These lectures are a mostly self-contained sequel to Vaughn Climenhaga's talks in week 1. The focus of the week 2 lectures will be on uniqueness of equilibrium states for rank 1 geodesic flows, and their mixing properties. Burns, Climenhaga, Fisher and myself showed recently that if the higher rank set does not carry full topological pressure then the equilibrium state is unique. I will discuss the proof of this result. With this result in hand, the question of when the “pressure gap” hypothesis can be verified becomes crucial. I will sketch our proof of the “entropy gap”, which is a new direct constructive proof of a result by Knieper. I will also describe new joint work with Ben Call, which shows that all the unique equilibrium states provided above have the Kolmogorov property. When the manifold has dimension at least 3, this is a new result even for the Knieper-Bowen-Margulis measure of maximal entropy. The common thread that links all of these arguments is that they rely on weak orbit specification properties in the spirit of Bowen.[-]

We prove a couple of general conditional convergence results on ergodic averages for horocycle and
geodesic subgroups of any continuous $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$- action on a locally compact space. These results are motivated by theorems of Eskin, Mirzakhani and Mohammadi on the $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$-action on the moduli space of Abelian differentials. By our argument we can derive from these theorems an improved version of the “weak convergence” of push-forwards of horocycle measures under the geodesic flow and a new short proof of a theorem of Chaika and Eskin on Birkhoff genericity in almost all directions for the Teichmüller geodesic flow.[-]

These lectures are a mostly self-contained sequel to Vaughn Climenhaga's talks in week 1. The focus of the week 2 lectures will be on uniqueness of equilibrium states for rank 1 geodesic flows, and their mixing properties. Burns, Climenhaga, Fisher and myself showed recently that if the higher rank set does not carry full topological pressure then the equilibrium state is unique. I will discuss the proof of this result. With this result in hand, the question of when the “pressure gap” hypothesis can be verified becomes crucial. I will sketch our proof of the “entropy gap”, which is a new direct constructive proof of a result by Knieper. I will also describe new joint work with Ben Call, which shows that all the unique equilibrium states provided above have the Kolmogorov property. When the manifold has dimension at least 3, this is a new result even for the Knieper-Bowen-Margulis measure of maximal entropy. The common thread that links all of these arguments is that they rely on weak orbit specification properties in the spirit of Bowen.[-]

These lectures are a mostly self-contained sequel to Vaughn Climenhaga's talks in week 1. The focus of the week 2 lectures will be on uniqueness of equilibrium states for rank 1 geodesic flows, and their mixing properties. Burns, Climenhaga, Fisher and myself showed recently that if the higher rank set does not carry full topological pressure then the equilibrium state is unique. I will discuss the proof of this result. With this result in hand, the question of when the “pressure gap” hypothesis can be verified becomes crucial. I will sketch our proof of the “entropy gap”, which is a new direct constructive proof of a result by Knieper. I will also describe new joint work with Ben Call, which shows that all the unique equilibrium states provided above have the Kolmogorov property. When the manifold has dimension at least 3, this is a new result even for the Knieper-Bowen-Margulis measure of maximal entropy. The common thread that links all of these arguments is that they rely on weak orbit specification properties in the spirit of Bowen.[-]

Smooth parametrizations of semi-algebraic sets were introduced by Yomdin in order to bound the local volume growth in his proof of Shub's entropy conjecture for C∞ maps. In this minicourse we will present some refinement of Yomdin's theory which allows us to also control the distortion. We will give two new applications: - for any C∞ surface diffeomorphism f with positive entropy the saddle periodic points with Lyapunov exponents $\delta$-away from zero for $\delta \in]0,htop(f)[$ are equidistributed along measures of maximal entropy. - for C∞ maps the entropy is physically greater than or equal to the top Lyapunov exponents of the exterior powers.[-]

Smooth parametrizations of semi-algebraic sets were introduced by Yomdin in order to bound the local volume growth in his proof of Shub's entropy conjecture for C∞ maps. In this minicourse we will present some refinement of Yomdin's theory which allows us to also control the distortion. We will give two new applications: - for any C∞ surface diffeomorphism f with positive entropy the saddle periodic points with Lyapunov exponents $\delta$-away from zero for $\delta \in]0,htop(f)[$ are equidistributed along measures of maximal entropy. - for C∞ maps the entropy is physically greater than or equal to the top Lyapunov exponents of the exterior powers.[-]

Works by Sarig and Benovadia have built symbolic dynamics for arbitrary diffeomorphisms of compact manifolds. This shows thatthere can be at most countably many ergodic hyperbolic equilibriummeasures for any Holder continuous or geometric potentials. We will explain how this yields uniqueness inside each homoclinic class of measures, i.e., of ergodic and hyperbolic measures that are homoclinically related. In some cases, further topological or geometric arguments can show global uniqueness.
This is a joint work with Sylvain Crovisier and Omri Sarig[-]

Smooth parametrizations of semi-algebraic sets were introduced by Yomdin in order to bound the local volume growth in his proof of Shub's entropy conjecture for C∞ maps. In this minicourse we will present some refinement of Yomdin's theory which allows us to also control the distortion. We will give two new applications: - for any C∞ surface diffeomorphism f with positive entropy the saddle periodic points with Lyapunov exponents $\delta$-away from zero for $\delta \in]0,htop(f)[$ are equidistributed along measures of maximal entropy. - for C∞ maps the entropy is physically greater than or equal to the top Lyapunov exponents of the exterior powers.[-]