פעילויות השבוע

Two flows are said to be Kakutani equivalent if one is isomorphic to the other after time change, or equivalently if there are Poincare sections for the flows so that the respective induced maps are isomorphic to each other. Ratner showed that if $G=\operatorname{SL}(2,\mathbb{R})$ and $\Gamma$ is a lattice in $G$, and if $u_t$ is a one parameter unipotent subgroup in $G$ then the $u_t$ action on $G/\Gamma$ equipped with Haar measure is loosely Bernoulli, i.e.\ Kakutani equivalent to a circle rotation. Thus any two such systems $(\operatorname{SL}(2,\mathbb{R})/\Gamma_i, u_t, m_i)$ are Kakutani equivalent to each other. On the other hand, Ratner showed that if $G=\operatorname{SL}(2,\mathbb{R})\times \operatorname{SL}(2,\mathbb{R})$ and $\Gamma$ is a reducible lattice, and $u_t$ is the diagonally embedded one parameter unipotent subgroup in $G$, then $(G/\Gamma, u_t, m)$ is not loosely Bernoulli.

We show that in fact in this case and many other situations one cannot have Kakutani equivalence between such systems unless they are actually isomorphic.

This is a joint work with Elon Lindenstrauss.

I will discuss a random walk on a metric graph, that is, on a one-dimensional cell complex. The main difference from the often considered case is that the endpoint of a walk can be any point on an edge of a metric graph and not just one of the vertices. Let a point start its motion along the path graph from a hanging vertex at the initial moment of time. The passage time for each individual edge is fixed. At each vertex, the point selects one of the edges for further movement with some nonzero probability. Backward turns on the edges are prohibited in this model. One could find asymptotics for the number N(T) of possible endpoints of such a random walk as the time T increases, i.e. number of all possible lengths of paths on metric graph that not exceed T. Solutions to this problem, depending on the type of graph, are associated with different problems of number theory. An overview of the results, which depend on the arithmetic properties of lengths, will be given as well as review of open problems.

A matrix cocycle is a non-commutative counterpart of random walk. The counterpart of the ergodic theorem, describing the almost sure asymptotic behaviour to leading order, is given by the theory of random matrix products originating in the works of Furstenberg—Kesten, Furstenberg, and Oseledec. On the other hand, the spectral theory of random one-dimensional second-order operators leads to the study of cocycles depending on an additional real number (the spectral parameter), and, a priori, the theory is applicable for almost all (rather than all) values of the parameter. The focus of the talk will be on the exceptional sets, where different asymptotic behaviour occurs: particularly, we shall discuss their rôle in spectral theory and their topologic and metric properties, including a result resembling the Jarnik theorem on Diophantine approximation. Based on joint work with Ilya Goldsheid.