Today’s post brings the lectures notes I used in my second (and last) exposition on Marcelo Viana’s article “Almost all cocycles over any hyperbolic system have nonvanishing Lyapunov exponents” (as a part of a “Groupe de Travail” organized by S. Crovisier and J. Buzzi).
In this previous post, we started with a cocycle
(
,
) over a non-uniformly hyperbolic basis
. Then, we saw that the vanishing of the top exponent
at
-a.e.
(that is the same as all Lyapunov exponents vanish because
takes values in
) implies some sort of domination (i.e., the dynamics of the cocycle along the fibers is dominated by the dynamics of the basis) and this last property (actually, 3-domination) allows for the construction of stable and unstable holonomies, e.g.,
,
, depending in a Lispchitz way on
and in a
way on
. Before putting these holonomies to work, we will state (without proof) the following result justifying the terminology “holonomy” (but which will be not used in the sequel):
Lemma 1 Let
be a
-dominated point, say
with
. For any
and
, one has
;
if and only if
.
Here, as usual, is the projective cocycle associated to
,
.
For later use, we denote by the projective stable/unstable holonomy associated to the stable/unstable holonomy
.
Now, we proceed to discuss the 2nd step of the strategy of proof of Theorem 5 of the first post on Marcelo’s article whose statement we recall below:
Theorem 5. For all and
with
, and
ergodic measure with local product structure, the set
of cocycles
with
for
-a.e.
is open, dense and it has
-codimension.
–2nd step of the proof of Theorem 5: holonomies and projective cocycles–
We start our considerations with the following notion:
Definition 2 We say that a compact set
,
, is a holonomy block.
During this entire section, we’ll make the following assumption:
Now, we take a
-invariant probability measure on
projecting to
(such a
always exists by compactness of
). By Rokhlin’s disintegration theorem (see also this link here for a modern exposition of this theorem),
can be disintegrated into a family
of probabilities on
such that
Moreover, Rokhlin’s theorem also ensures that the disintegration is essentially uniquein the sense that if also verifies
then for
-a.e.
.
Next, let us fix a holonomy block of positive
-measure, say
, and let
be a small positive real number such that
for every
with
. Here, we denote by
the unique point
whenever
,
. For each
, we define
and
Similarly, we define ,
and
by replacing the condition
by
in the definitions above.
The main result of this section is the following proposition:
Proposition 3 (Invariance by holonomies) Under the assumption (ZE), there exists a set
of full
-measure such that
for all
in a fixed stable leaf
.
As we hinted in the description of the strategy of proof of Theorem 5 (in this previous post here), the key tool in the proof of this proposition is the following result of F. Ledrappier (whose proof will be omitted):
Theorem 4 (F. Ledrappier) Let
be an injective measurable transformation of a Lebesgue space
, and
a
-integrable cocycle (i.e.,
is
-integrable). Let
is a
-algebra such that
(mod
) and
generates
(mod
);
- the
-algebra generated by
is contained in
(mod
).
Then, if
for
-a.e.
, we have that the map
is
-measurable (mod
), where
is the disintegration of a
-invariant probability
on
(and
is the projective cocycle corresponding to
and
).
Once one disposes of Ledrappier’s theorem, the idea of the proof of Proposition 3 is quite simple: one “translates” the invariance by holonomies condition into a measurability statement with respect to an adequate -algebra. To formalize this idea, we need the following “Markov partition like statement”:
Proposition 5 There exists an integer
and a family of subsets
such that
- The subsets
are not very small:
for all
;
- Markov-like property: for any
,
, if
, then
.
At this point, I asked the audience of my second talk whether they wanted to hear about the details of this proposition. After a little discussion, Sylvain and Francois voted for skipping it since the arguments are very close to Bowen’s classical construction of Markov partitions (for uniformly hyperbolic systems), and I ended up by accepting their (sensate) decision. However, for this blog post, I believe that we could take the opportunity to discuss this topic, and we’ll do so here. But, in order to avoid interrupting the proof of Theorem 5, we’ll postpone it to the “Appendix” (last section of this post).
Anyway, by assuming this proposition, we consider as above, and, for each
, denote by
the biggest
such that
. Observe that, without loss of generality, we can also assume that
in the proposition above.
Let be the
-algebra generated by
, i.e.,
Finally, let us introduce the cocycle ,
The lemma allowing us to convert the invariance by holonomies statement for into a measurability statement for
is the following one:
Lemma 6 We have the following properties:
- (i)
and
generates the Borel
-algebra
of
;
- (ii) the
-algebra generated by
is contained in
;
- (iii)
is
-integrable;
- (iv) the cocycles
and
have the same Lyapunov exponents.
Proof: Note that is the
-algebra generated by
. By the Markov-like property (see the 2nd item of Proposition 5),
, i.e.,
. Also, since
is the
-algebra generated by
, and
as
(as
,
). It follows that
generates
. This proves (i) above.
By definition of , one can check that
whenever
is measurable (this is essentially the fact that
is constant equal to
on each
with
). In other words, the
-algebra generated by
is contained in
. This proves (ii) above.
The -integrability of
is “almost obvious” from the
-integrability of
, except maybe by the case
and
. In the latter case, one notices that
and
are uniformly close to the identity (by Proposition 12 and Corollary 14 of the previous post). This proves (iii) above.
Finally, it suffices to show that the cocycles and
are conjugated by a conjugacy at a bounded distance of the identity to get that they have the same Lyapunov exponents. In our case, we have
where
Again by Proposition 12 and Corollary 14 of the previous post, we have that the conjugation is uniformly close to the identity. This proves (iv).
From this lemma, we can translate the invariance by holonomy condition for into a measurability condition for
to get a proof of Proposition 3 as follows:
Proof: In the case of a -valued cocycle (
), one has that
for
-a.e.
if and only if
for
-a.e.
. By the previous lemma, this implies that
for
-a.e.
. Also, we observe that, by Rokhlin’s theorem,
is
-invariant if and only
for
-a.e.
.
Now, we construct the following family of probabilities :
We claim that the probability measure on
with disitegration
is
-invariant. Indeed,
- if
,
, we have
- if
,
,
- the remaining case is evident (as
and
).
In any case, we see that is
-invariant. This discussion combined with Lemma 6 say that the cocycle
and the
-algebra
fulfill the hypothesis of Ledrappier’s theorem. Hence, we conclude that the map
is -measurable. By definition of
, this
-measurability statement implies the following property: there is a subset
of full
-measure such that
whenever . By definition of
and the nice “composition” properties of the stable holonomies, we have that the preivous equality means
whenever . Since
(i.e.,
is not very small, see Proposition 5), the proof of Proposition 3 is complete.
Next, we combine Proposition 3 of invariance by holonomy with the local product structure of to deduce the following continuity result:
Proposition 7 Under the assumption (ZE), it holds that any
-invariant probability
(projecting to
) admits a disintegration
such that
- (a) the map
is continuous;
- (b)
is invariant under stable and unstable holonomies on the whole support of
.
Proof: Let , where
and
are the subsets provided by Proposition 3. We have that
. Since
has local product structure (
), we have that
for
-a.e.
. Fix
a
-generic point and define
when and
, and
otherwise. (This task would be easier if we could take
, but we can’t do that in general). By definition of
and local product structure,
for
-a.e.
, i.e.,
is a disintegration of
. Moreover,
varies continuously along unstable leaves
because, for each
, the unstable holonomy
is a Lipschitz function of
(see Proposition 12 of the previous post). Now, we fix
a
-generic point and let
the disintegration of
obtained from
by forcing stable-holonomy invariance from
, i.e.,
when and
, and
otherwise. Again by definition of
and local product structure, it follows that
is a disintegration of
such that
is invariant by stable holonomies and
varies continuously on the whole
!
By a dual procedure, we can also construct a disintegration of
such that
is invariant by unstable holonomies and
varies constinuously on the whole
. By the uniqueness of the disintegration, we have that
for
-a.e.
. By continuity, actually we must have
for every
. This completes the proof.
–3rd step of the proof of Theorem 5: contamination by periodic points (part I)–
Recall (from the previous post) that a periodic point of
is dominated for
when
with
.
Proposition 8 If
is a periodic point dominated for
, then there exists a neighborhood
of
such that, for any
, the map
is
. Moreover, given
linearly independent, the map
is a submersion.
For the proof of this proposition, we will need the following fact about the Lie group ,
:
Remark 1 Given
linearly independent, the map
,
is a submersion.
Using this remark, the proof of Proposition 8 goes as follows:
Proof: Fix be a neighborhood of
such that
. By the usual partition of unity argument, for any
(i.e., a traceless
matrix), there exists
such that
and
for all
. By the formula of Lemma 15 of the previous post (see also the remark below), the choice of
and the fact that
when
imply
Since the directions are linearly independent (because
are linearly independent), the proposition follows from Remark 1.
Remark 2 In the previous argument, the computation of derivative of
with respect to the variable
(provided by the formula of Proposition bla of the previous post) was simplified by the choice of
with
for all
. However, this choice of
depends on a partition of unity argument, and hence it is not well suited to deal with real/complex-analyticcocycles (even though it is well-adapted to
cocycles). In principle, one could work with “more global” choices of
, but this amounts to deal with the complete expression of
, namely,
and it is not clear how to use this to get that the desired map is a submersion. Actually, to the best of my knowledge, the question of extending Marcelo’s theorem to real/complex-analytic cocycles is open, and, as far as I can see, the choice of “good”
‘s (with respect to the formula for
) is the sole issue here.
A corollary of the proof of Proposition 8 is the following result:
Corollary 9 Given
periodic points of
with periods
(resp.), the map
is a submersion.
Proof: For each , let
. Given
in
, we fix
a neighborhood of
such that they are mutually disjoint and
is the unique point in the intersection of
and the several periodic orbits. By the usual partition of unity argument, we can take a
curve
such that
and
for every
,
;
for each
.
It follows that . Since
are arbitrary, the proof of the corollary is complete.
The discussion above prepares the “contamination by periodic points” argument: roughly speaking, we just saw that one has sufficient freedom to deform cocycles nearby any finite family of periodic points. Of course, in order to profit of this “freedom”, we need to produce “lots” of periodic points. This will be the main concern of the remainder of this section (where we will construct holonomy blocks with “several” periodic points).
In the sequel, we denote by and we assume that
.
Proposition 10 For every
,
, there exists a holonomy block
of
such that
and there are
distinct dominated periodic points with
- (1) the periodic points are heteroclinically related:
- (2) the periodic points are “generic”:
, where
is the period of
.
The proof of this proposition is an adaptation of the so-called Katok’s shadowing lemma allowing to construct “lots” of periodic points inside hyperbolic blocks for non-uniformly hyperbolic systems:
Theorem 11 (Katok’s shadowing lemma) For every
and
, there are
,
,
and compact subsets
with
as
such that for any
and
with
and
, there is a periodic point
of period
verifying the following properties:
is hyperbolic,
for each
eigenvalue of
, and
for all
,
;
has size
and it is uniformly transverse (i.e., it makes an angle
) with all unstable disks centered at
; in particular,
for all
;
for each
.
Morally speaking, the difference between Katok’s shadowing lemma and Proposition 10 is the fact that the compact subsets in Katok’s result are closely related to hyperbolic blocks, while the compact subsets
in Proposition 10 are holonomy blocks (i.e., subsets of hyperbolic blocks given by certain domination constraints), and hence
are “usually” smaller than
. However, from the technical point of view, this difference is not a big deal, but the proof of Proposition 10 from Katok’s shadowing lemma is not exciting (in the sense that we don’t need to introduce new ideas during the process). So, I will proceed as in my lecture and I will skip it (recommending to the curious reader to consult pages 667–671 of Marcelo’s article).
In any event, a direct corollary of Proposition 10 and Proposition 8 is the following result:
Corollary 12 Let
periodic points as in Proposition 10, and let
,
. Let
,
,
such that, for each
,
are linearly independent. Then,
is a submersion (where
is a sufficiently small
neighborhood of
).
–4th step of the proof of Theorem 5: contamination by periodic points (part II)–
We start the proof of Theorem 5 with the case . Given
, we take
a holonomy block with
dominated periodic points
(with periods
). By Corollary 9, the map
is a submersion. On the other hand, denoting by the subset of matrices with a pair of eigenvalues with the same norm. We have that
is contained in a finite union of submanifolds of codimension
.
Therefore, the set
has codimension . Without loss of generality, we can assume that
for all
and
. For each
, let
,
, be the eigenspaces of
, and
.
By Corollary 12, the map
is a submersion. Hence, the subset
has codimension .
Fix . We claim that
for
in subset of positive
-measure set. Indeed, suppose that this is not the case. Then, we will reach a contradiction by the following contamination by periodic points argument.
On one hand, by definition of and
, we have that
for all and
. On the other hand, by Proposition 7, we know that if
for
-a.e.
, then any
-invariant probability
on
(projecting to
) admits a disintegration
such that
- the map
is continuous,
is invariant by holonomies.
Now, we observe that if is
-invariant, then
for
-a.e.
. Hence, by continuity, it follows that
for all . Here, we also used that
(by Proposition 10). In particular, if
, we get that, for each
,
is a convex combination of Dirac measures supported on
‘s. Combining this with the invariance by holonomies, we obtain that, for any
such that
and for every
, one can find
with
Of course, this is a contradiction with (1)showing that if satisfies
for
-a.e.
, then
. Since
and
have codimension
and
is arbitrary, the proof of Theorem 5 in the case
is complete.
Next, we consider the case . Here, the subset
of matrices with a pair of eigenvalues with the same norm hasn’t codimension
: actually, the subset of matrices of
with a pair of complex (non-real) conjugated eigenvalues is open! Hence, the argument employed above to deal with the case
can’t be mimicked here.
To overcome this technical difficulty, we recall the following standard trick to “convert” a pair of complex conjugated eigenvalues of a matrix into two real eigenvalues of distinct norms of a matrix
close to some power
of
: if
is a (complex) eigenvalue of
, then
is an eigenvalue of
; by appropriately choosing
, we have that
can be made arbitrarily close to
(i.e.,
close
mod
); then, by a preliminary small perturbation of
, we can make
and its complex conjugate
both equal to
, and, by another small perturbation, we can “separate” them into two real eigenvalues of distinct norms (say one with norm
and the other with norm
).
The idea in the general setting of cocycles
over a non-uniformly hyperbolic basis
is simply to adapt the previous trick, namely, if some of the periodic points
considered above (in a holonomy block
) is “problematic”, i.e.,
has some pair of complex conjugated eigenvalues, one uses a result of C. Bonatti and M. Viana allowing to replace
by a nearby periodic point
whose period
is a (well-chosen) multiple of
so that
has a pair of real eigenvalues of distinct norms, up to excluding a subset of
cocycles of positive codimension. Then, up to performing finitely many of such “exclusions” of positive codimension subsets of
cocycles, we can assume that the periodic points
in the holonomy block
were chosen so that
only has real eigenvalues of distinct norms, and thus the same argument of the case
can be applied from this point on. For more details, we recommend reading pages 674-675 of Marcelo’s article.
At this point, our considerations on Theorem 5 of the previous post are finished. Closing this section, let us say a few words on the proofs of Corollaries 6 and 7 of the previous post. In these corollaries, the measure was not assumed to be ergodic, but a classical argument based on the local product structure assumption on
and a Hopf-like argument (see Lemma 5.1 of Marcelo’s article) says that
has countably many ergodic components
,
in the case of non-uniformly hyperbolic systems
and
has finitely many ergodic components
in the case of uniformly hyperbolic homeomorphisms
, i.e.,
with
countable or finite. Moroever, each
,
, has local product structure, and hence Theorem 5 can be applied to each
,
. As a consequence, we get an open and dense subset
of
with
-codimension such that, for every
, it holds
for
-a.e.
.
Therefore, the subset of
is residual when
is countable (the case of
non-uniformly hyperbolic) and open, dense with
-codimension when
is finite (the case of
uniformly hyperbolic). Moreover, any
satisfies
for
-a.e.
. This proves the desired corollaries.
–Some comments and open questions–
In this section, we collect some natural open questions motivated by Marcelo’s theorem.
During our discussion, we dealt exclusively with the group . In fact, the main properties we used about this group (see Proposition 8) were:
- Every
can be approximated by matrices in
with eigenvalues of distinct norms;
- the map
is a submersion whenever
are linearly independent.
This last property requires . In particular, we “miss” important classical groups in Dynamics, such as the symplectic group
(whose dimension is
). So, one natural question is: classify the Lie groups
such that “typical”
-valued cocycles satisfy the conclusion of Marcelo’s theorem.
Another natural question is about the “topological nature” of the subset of cocycles with vanishing top exponent. For instance, is
closed? if not, does the closure of
have
-codimension? Of course, the first question is stronger than the second one, and both of them would follow easily if we knew that the Lyapunov exponents
vary continuously with the cocycle
in the
-topology (
). In particular, this motivates the question: when do the Lyapunov exponents vary continuously? To the best of my knowledge, the current scenario is the following: for
-topology, we know (after the works of Bochi and Viana, see here and here) that
is a point of
-continuity whenever the Oseledets splitting is dominated or trivial. Moreover, Bochi and Viana have examples of discontinuity for the
-topology with
small. Also, it was recently shown by Bocker and Viana that Lyapunov exponents of locally constant
cocycles over Bernoulli shifts vary continuously with the cocycle (and the probability weights).
Closing this section, we recall that Bonatti, Gomez-Mont, Viana showed that the subset of cocycles with non-vanishing Lyapunov exponents can be chosen independently of the measure
if we consider exclusively dominated cocycles (in an appropriated sense). Of course, a natural question is whether such a choice of
(independently of
) can be made in general, i.e., in the statement of Theorem 5.
–Appendix: proof of Proposition 5–
We end today’s post with the proof of Proposition 5 (on the construction of Markov-like partitions). Take with
and set
. For each
, let
and define inductively
where . By definition,
and
for all
.
Definition 13 Let
and
, i.e.,
and
Definition 14 Let
where
.
We claim that satisfies the conclusions of Proposition 5. Indeed, we begin by showing that
is not very small:
Lemma 15
for all
.
Proof: By definition of and
, one has
for all
. Hence,
. Now, given
and
, let
We know that as
(since
). So, if
is sufficiently small, we have
for all
. On the other hand,
for all
and
. Therefore,
so that for all
. In particular, it follows that
. This completes the proof of the lemma.
Next, we will show that satisfies the Markov-like property. To do so, we need the following lemma:
Lemma 16 Suppose that
. Then,
- (a)
and
- (b) for all
, if
, then
.
Proof: Let us prove item (a). If intersects
, then
, and hence
. Thus, our task is reduced to consider the case
for some
.
If , one gets
. Thus,
(since, otherwise,
, and hence
). Therefore,
. In particular,
(because
implies
) and, a fortiori,
.
The remaining case is similar: one has
, and so we fit into the hypothesis of the lemma with
replaced by
and
replaced by
. Hence, by induction, we complete the proof of item (a) (as the case
is immediate).
Now, let us prove item (b). If , we have
, and hence, by definition of
, one gets
. By item (a) (we just proved), it follows that
, a contradiction with the fact that
. If
, we have
, so that, by item (a),
Thus, , and the proof of the lemma is complete.
Finally, we end the proof of Proposition 5 by verifying the Markov-like property. Assume that . By item (a) of the previous lemma, it follows that
. Therefore, by definition of
, it suffices to check that
for all
. By item (b) of the previous lemma, if
for some
, then
, and hence, by definition of
and
,
, a contradiction. This ends the argument.
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