We define the co-spectral radius of inclusions ${\mathcal S}\leq {\mathcal R}$ of discrete, probability- measure-preserving equivalence relations as the sampling exponent of a generating random walk on the ambient relation. The co-spectral radius is analogous to the spectral radius for random walks on $G/H$ for inclusion $H\leq G$ of groups. For the proof, we develop a more general version of the 2–3 method we used in another work on the growth of unimodular random rooted trees. We use this method to show that the walk growth exists for an arbitrary unimodular random rooted graph of bounded degree. We also investigate how the co-spectral radius behaves for hyperfinite relations, and discuss new critical exponents for percolation that can be defined using the co-spectral radius.

We describe two kinds of regular invariant measures on the boundary path space $\partial E$ of a second countable topological graph E, which allows us to describe all extremal tracial weights on $C^{*}(E)$ which are not gauge-invariant. Using this description, we prove that all tracial weights on the C$^{*}$-algebra $C^{*}(E)$ of a second countable topological graph E are gauge-invariant when E is free. This in particular implies that all tracial weights on $C^{*}(E)$ are gauge-invariant when $C^{*}(E)$ is simple and separable.

We show that for every countable group, any sequence of approximate homomorphisms with values in permutations can be realized as the restriction of a sofic approximation of an orbit equivalence relation. Moreover, this orbit equivalence relation is uniquely determined by the invariant random subgroup of the approximate homomorphisms. We record applications of this result to recover various known stability and conjugacy characterizations for almost homomorphisms of amenable groups.

We prove that if two free probability-measure-preserving (p.m.p.) ${\mathbb Z}$-actions are Shannon orbit equivalent, then they have the same entropy. The argument also applies more generally to yield the same conclusion for free p.m.p. actions of finitely generated virtually Abelian groups. Together with the isomorphism theorems of Ornstein and Ornstein–Weiss and the entropy invariance results of Austin and Kerr–Li in the non-virtually-cyclic setting, this shows that two Bernoulli actions of any non-locally-finite countably infinite amenable group are Shannon orbit equivalent if and only if they are measure conjugate. We also show, at the opposite end of the stochastic spectrum, that every ${\mathbb Z}$-odometer is Shannon orbit equivalent to the universal ${\mathbb Z}$-odometer.

Pavlov [Adv. Math. 295 (2016), 250–270; Nonlinearity 32 (2019), 2441–2466] studied the measures of maximal entropy for dynamical systems with weak versions of specification property and found the existence of intrinsic ergodicity would be influenced by the assumptions of the gap functions. Inspired by these, in this article, we study the dynamical systems with non-uniform specification property. We give some basic properties these systems have and give an assumption for the gap functions to ensure the systems have the following five properties: CO-measures are dense in invariant measures; for every non-empty compact connected subset of invariant measures, its saturated set is dense in the total space; ergodic measures are residual in invariant measures; ergodic measures are connected; and entropy-dense. In addition, we will give examples to show the assumption is optimal.

The first part of this work is devoted to the study of higher derivatives of pressure functions of Hölder potentials on shift spaces with finitely many symbols. By describing the derivatives of pressure functions via the central limit theorem for the associated random processes, we discover some rigid relationships between derivatives of various orders. The rigidity imposes obstructions on fitting candidate convex analytic functions by pressure functions of Hölder potentials globally, which answers a question of Kucherenko and Quas. In the second part of the work, we consider fitting candidate analytic germs by pressure functions of locally constant potentials. We prove that all 1-level candidate germs can be realised by pressures of some locally constant potentials, as long as the number of symbols in the symbolic set is large enough. There are also some results on fitting 2-level germs by pressures of locally constant potentials obtained in the work.

In this work we prove that every shift of finite type (SFT), sofic shift, and strongly irreducible shift on locally finite groups has strong dynamical properties. These properties include that every sofic shift is an SFT, every SFT is strongly irreducible, every strongly irreducible shift is an SFT, every SFT is entropy minimal, and every SFT has a unique measure of maximal entropy, among others. In addition, we show that if every SFT on a group is strongly irreducible, or if every sofic shift is an SFT, then the group must be locally finite, and this extends to all of the properties we explore. These results are collected in two main theorems which characterize the local finiteness of groups by purely dynamical properties. In pursuit of these results, we present a formal construction of free extension shifts on a group G, which takes a shift on a subgroup H of G, and naturally extends it to a shift on all of G.

We show that, generically, the unique invariant measure of a sufficiently regular piecewise smooth circle homeomorphism with irrational rotation number and zero mean nonlinearity (e.g. piecewise linear) has zero Hausdorff dimension. To encode this generic condition, we consider piecewise smooth homeomorphisms as generalized interval exchange transformations (GIETs) of the interval and rely on the notion of combinatorial rotation number for GIETs, which can be seen as an extension of the classical notion of rotation number for circle homeomorphisms to the GIET setting.

We prove that a generic probability measure-preserving (p.m.p.) action of a countable amenable group G has scaling entropy that cannot be dominated by a given rate of growth. As a corollary, we obtain that there does not exist a topological action of G for which the set of ergodic invariant measures coincides with the set of all ergodic p.m.p. G-systems of entropy zero. We also prove that a generic action of a residually finite amenable group has scaling entropy that cannot be bounded from below by a given sequence. In addition, we show an example of an amenable group that has such a lower bound for every free p.m.p. action.

We show that the mode-locking region of the family of quasi-periodically forced Arnold circle maps with a topologically generic forcing function is dense. This gives a rigorous verification of certain numerical observations in [M. Ding, C. Grebogi and E. Ott. Evolution of attractors in quasiperiodically forced systems: from quasiperiodic to strange nonchaotic to chaotic. Phys. Rev. A 39(5) (1989), 2593–2598] for such forcing functions. More generally, under some general conditions on the base map, we show the density of the mode-locking property among dynamically forced maps (defined in [Z. Zhang. On topological genericity of the mode-locking phenomenon. Math. Ann. 376 (2020), 707–72]) equipped with a topology that is much stronger than the $C^0$ topology, compatible with smooth fiber maps. For quasi-periodic base maps, our result generalizes the main results in [A. Avila, J. Bochi and D. Damanik. Cantor spectrum for Schrödinger operators with potentials arising from generalized skew-shifts. Duke Math. J. 146 (2009), 253–280], [J. Wang, Q. Zhou and T. Jäger. Genericity of mode-locking for quasiperiodically forced circle maps. Adv. Math. 348 (2019), 353–377] and Zhang (2020).