We study the asymptotic dynamics of piecewise-contracting maps defined on a compact interval. For maps that are not necessarily injective, but have a finite number of local extrema and discontinuity points, we prove the existence of a decomposition of the support of the asymptotic dynamics into a finite number of minimal components. Each component is either a periodic orbit or a minimal Cantor set and such that the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$ -limit set of (almost) every point in the interval is exactly one of these components. Moreover, we show that each component is the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$ -limit set, or the closure of the orbit, of a one-sided limit of the map at a discontinuity point or at a local extremum.

In this paper, we construct and study a semigroup associated to an action of a countable discrete group on a compact Hausdorff space that can be regarded as a higher dimensional generalization of the type semigroup. We study when this semigroup is almost unperforated. This leads to a new characterization of dynamical comparison and thus answers a question of Kerr and Schafhauser. In addition, this paper suggests a definition of comparison for dynamical systems in which neither the acting group is necessarily amenable nor the action is minimal.

A Cantor action is a minimal equicontinuous action of a countably generated group $G$ on a Cantor space $X$ . Such actions are also called generalized odometers in the literature. In this work, we introduce two new conjugacy invariants for Cantor actions, the stabilizer limit group and the centralizer limit group. An action is wild if the stabilizer limit group is an increasing sequence of stabilizer groups without bound and otherwise is said to be stable if this group chain is bounded. For Cantor actions by a finitely generated group $G$ , we prove that stable actions satisfy a rigidity principle and furthermore show that the wild property is an invariant of the continuous orbit equivalence class of the action. A Cantor action is said to be dynamically wild if it is wild and the centralizer limit group is a proper subgroup of the stabilizer limit group. This property is also a conjugacy invariant and we show that a Cantor action with a non-Hausdorff element must be dynamically wild. We then give examples of wild Cantor actions with non-Hausdorff elements, using recursive methods from geometric group theory to define actions on the boundaries of trees.

In this paper we analyse the non-wandering set of one-dimensional Greenberg–Hastings cellular automaton models for excitable media with $e\geqslant 1$ excited and $r\geqslant 1$ refractory states and determine its (strictly positive) topological entropy. We show that it results from a Devaney chaotic closed invariant subset of the non-wandering set that consists of colliding and annihilating travelling waves, which is conjugate to a skew-product dynamical system of coupled shift dynamics. Moreover, we determine the remaining part of the non-wandering set explicitly as a Markov system with strictly less topological entropy that also scales differently for large $e,r$ .

First, we generalize the definition of a locally compact topology given by Paterson and Welch for a sequence of locally compact spaces to the case where the underlying spaces are $T_{1}$ and sober. We then consider a certain semilattice of basic open sets for this topology on the space of all paths on a graph and impose relations motivated by the definitions of graph C*-algebra in order to recover the boundary path space of a graph. This is done using techniques of pointless topology. Finally, we generalize the results to the case of topological graphs.

We study the locally compact abelian groups in the class ${\mathfrak E_{ \lt \infty }}$, that is, having only continuous endomorphisms of finite topological entropy, and in its subclass $\mathfrak E_0$, that is, having all continuous endomorphisms with vanishing topological entropy. We discuss the reduction of the problem to the case of periodic locally compact abelian groups, and then to locally compact abelian p-groups. We show that locally compact abelian p-groups of finite rank belong to ${\mathfrak E_{ \lt \infty }}$, and that those of them that belong to $\mathfrak E_0$ are precisely the ones with discrete maximal divisible subgroup. Furthermore, the topological entropy of endomorphisms of locally compact abelian p-groups of finite rank coincides with the logarithm of their scale. The backbone of the paper is the Addition Theorem for continuous endomorphisms of locally compact abelian groups. Various versions of the Addition Theorem are established in the paper and used in the proofs of the main results, but its validity in the general case remains an open problem.

We study homeomorphisms of a Cantor set with $k$ ( $k<+\infty$ ) minimal invariant closed (but not open) subsets; we also study crossed product C*-algebras associated to these Cantor systems and certain of their orbit-cut sub-C*-algebras. In the case where $k\geq 2$ , the crossed product C*-algebra is stably finite, has stable rank 2, and has real rank 0 if in addition $(X,\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E})$ is aperiodic. The image of the index map is connected to certain directed graphs arising from the Bratteli–Vershik–Kakutani model of the Cantor system. Using this, it is shown that the ideal of the Bratteli diagram (of the Bratteli–Vershik–Kakutani model) must have at least $k$ vertices at each level, and the image of the index map must consist of infinitesimals.

In this paper we continue the study of automorphism groups of constant-length substitution shifts and also their topological factors. We show that, up to conjugacy, all roots of the identity map are letter-exchanging maps, and all other non-trivial automorphisms arise from twisted compressions of another constant-length substitution. We characterize the group of roots of the identity in both the measurable and topological setting. Finally, we show that any topological factor of a constant-length substitution shift is topologically conjugate to a constant-length substitution shift via a letter-to-letter code.

We consider a certain two-parameter family of automorphisms of the affine plane over a complete, locally compact non-Archimedean field. Each of these automorphisms admits a chaotic attractor on which it is topologically conjugate to a full two-sided shift map, and the attractor supports a unit Borel measure which describes the distribution of the forward orbit of Haar-almost all points in the basin of attraction. We also compute the Hausdorff dimension of the attractor, which is non-integral.

We study the continuity of topological entropy of general diffeomorphisms on line. First, we prove that the entropy map is continuous with respect to the strong $C^{0}$ -topology on the union of uniformly topologically hyperbolic diffeomorphisms contained in $\text{Diff}_{0}^{r}(\mathbb{R})$ (whose first derivative is uniformly away from zero), which is a $C^{0}$ -open and $C^{r}$ -dense subset of $\text{Diff}_{0}^{r}(\mathbb{R})$ , $r=1,2,\ldots ,\infty$ , and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$ (real analytic). Second, we give some examples where entropy map is not continuous. Finally, we prove some results on the continuity of entropy of general diffeomorphisms on the (real) line.

In this paper we study topological properties of the right action by translation of the Weyl chamber flow on the space of Weyl chambers. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for topological mixing.

We address the problem of defining Lyapunov exponents for an expansive homeomorphism f on a compact metric space (X, dist) using similar techniques as those developed in Barreira and Silva [Lyapunov exponents for continuous transformations and dimension theory, Discrete Contin. Dynam. Sys.13 (2005), 469–490]; Kifer [Characteristic exponents of dynamical systems in metric spaces, Ergod. Th. Dynam. Sys.3 (1983), 119–127]. Under certain conditions on the topology of the space X where f acts we obtain that there is a metric D defining the topology of X such that the Lyapunov exponents of f are different from zero with respect to D for every point x ∈ X. We give an example showing that this may not be true with respect to the original metric dist. But expansiveness of f ensures that Lyapunov exponents do not vanish on a Gδ subset of X with respect to any metric defining the topology of X. We define Lyapunov exponents on compact invariant sets of Peano spaces and prove that if the maximal exponent on the compact set is negative then the compact is an attractor.

Let $(X,\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E})$ be a transitive sofic shift and let $\operatorname{Aut}(X)$ denote its automorphism group. We generalize a result of Frisch, Schlank, and Tamuz to show that any normal amenable subgroup of $\operatorname{Aut}(X)$ must be contained in the subgroup generated by the shift. We also show that the result does not extend to higher dimensions by giving an example of a two-dimensional mixing shift of finite type due to Hochman whose automorphism group is amenable and not generated by the shift maps.

We introduce the notions ‘virtual automorphism group’ of a minimal flow and ‘semiregular flow’ and investigate the relationship between the virtual and actual group of automorphisms.

We study lattice embeddings for the class of countable groups $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ defined by the property that the largest amenable uniformly recurrent subgroup ${\mathcal{A}}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}}$ is continuous. When ${\mathcal{A}}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}}$ comes from an extremely proximal action and the envelope of ${\mathcal{A}}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}}$ is coamenable in  $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ , we obtain restrictions on the locally compact groups $G$ that contain a copy of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ as a lattice, notably regarding normal subgroups of  $G$ , product decompositions of  $G$ , and more generally dense mappings from $G$ to a product of locally compact groups.

Subshifts with property $(A)$ are constructed from a class of directed graphs. As special cases the Markov–Dyck shifts are shown to have property $(A)$ . The semigroups that are associated to ${\mathcal{R}}$ -graph shifts with Property $(A)$ are determined.

We study multidimensional minimal and quasiperiodic shifts of finite type. We prove for these classes several results that were previously known for the shifts of finite type in general, without restriction. We show that some quasiperiodic shifts of finite type admit only non-computable configurations; we characterize the classes of Turing degrees that can be represented by quasiperiodic shifts of finite type. We also transpose to the classes of minimal/quasiperiodic shifts of finite type some results on subdynamics previously known for effective shifts without restrictions: every effective minimal (quasiperiodic) shift of dimension $d$ can be represented as a projection of a subdynamics of a minimal (respectively, quasiperiodic) shift of finite type of dimension $d+1$ .

Using an idea of Doug Lind, we give a lower bound for the Perron–Frobenius degree of a Perron number that is not totally real, in terms of the layout of its Galois conjugates in the complex plane. As an application, we prove that there are cubic Perron numbers whose Perron–Frobenius degrees are arbitrary large, a result known to Lind, McMullen and Thurston. A similar result is proved for bi-Perron numbers.

A well-known result in the area of dynamical systems asserts that any invertible hyperbolic operator on any Banach space is structurally stable. This result was originally obtained by Hartman in 1960 for operators on finite-dimensional spaces. The general case was independently obtained by Palis and Pugh around 1968. We will exhibit a class of examples of structurally stable operators that are not hyperbolic, thereby showing that the converse of the above-mentioned result is false in general. We will also prove that an invertible operator on a Banach space is hyperbolic if and only if it is expansive and has the shadowing property. Moreover, we will show that if a structurally stable operator is expansive, then it must be uniformly expansive. Finally, we will characterize the weighted shifts on the spaces $c_{0}(\mathbb{Z})$ and $\ell _{p}(\mathbb{Z})$ ( $1\leq p<\infty$ ) that satisfy the shadowing property.

The field of descriptive combinatorics investigates to what extent classical combinatorial results and techniques can be made topologically or measure-theoretically well behaved. This paper examines a class of coloring problems induced by actions of countable groups on Polish spaces, with the requirement that the desired coloring be Baire measurable. We show that the set of all such coloring problems that admit a Baire measurable solution for a particular free action $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is complete analytic (apart from the trivial situation when the orbit equivalence relation induced by $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is smooth on a comeager set); this result confirms the ‘hardness’ of finding a topologically well-behaved coloring. When $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is the shift action, we characterize the class of problems for which $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ has a Baire measurable coloring in purely combinatorial terms; it turns out that closely related concepts have already been studied in graph theory with no relation to descriptive set theory. We remark that our framework permits a wholly dynamical interpretation (with colorings corresponding to equivariant maps to a given subshift), so this article can also be viewed as a contribution to generic dynamics.