In this article, we continue the structural study of factor maps between symbolic dynamical systems and the relative thermodynamic formalism. Here, one is studying a factor map from a shift of finite type X (equipped with a potential function) to a sofic shift Z, equipped with a shift-invariant measure $\nu $ . We study relative equilibrium states, that is, shift-invariant measures on X that push forward under the factor map to $\nu $ which maximize the relative pressure: the relative entropy plus the integral of $\phi $ . In this paper, we establish a new connection to multiplicative ergodic theory by relating these factor triples to a cocycle of Ruelle–Perron–Frobenius operators, and showing that the principal Lyapunov exponent of this cocycle is the relative pressure; and the dimension of the leading Oseledets space is equal to the number of measures of relative maximal entropy, counted with a previously identified concept of multiplicity.

Given any smooth Anosov map, we construct a Banach space on which the associated transfer operator is quasi-compact. The peculiarity of such a space is that, in the case of expanding maps, it reduces exactly to the usual space of functions of bounded variation which has proved to be particularly successful in studying the statistical properties of piecewise expanding maps. Our approach is based on a new method of studying the absolute continuity of foliations, which provides new information that could prove useful in treating hyperbolic systems with singularities.

We show that the ergodic integrals for the horocycle flow on the two-torus associated by Giulietti and Liverani with an Anosov diffeomorphism either grow linearly or are bounded; in other words, there are no deviations. For this, we use the topological invariance of the Artin–Mazur zeta function to exclude resonances outside the open unit disc. Transfer operators acting on suitable spaces of anisotropic distributions and their Ruelle determinants are the key tools used in the proof. As a bonus, we show that for any $C^\infty $ Anosov diffeomorphism F on the two-torus, the correlations for the measure of maximal entropy and $C^\infty $ observables decay with a rate strictly smaller than $e^{-h_{\mathrm {top}}(F)}$ . We compare our results with very recent related work of Forni.

We prove the existence of a discrete correlation spectrum for Morse–Smale flows acting on smooth forms on a compact manifold. This is done by constructing spaces of currents with anisotropic Sobolev regularity on which the Lie derivative has a discrete spectrum.

We present quantitative studies of transfer operators between finite element spaces associated with unrelated meshes. Several local approximations of the global L2-orthogonal projection are reviewed and evaluated computationally. The numerical studies in 3D provide the first estimates of the quantitative differences between a range of transfer operators between non-nested finite element spaces. We consider the standard finite element interpolation, Clément’s quasi-interpolation with different local polynomial degrees, the global L2-orthogonal projection, a local L2-quasi-projection via a discrete inner product, and a pseudo-L2-projection defined by a Petrov-Galerkin variational equation with a discontinuous test space. Understanding their qualitative and quantitative behaviors in this computational way is interesting per se; it could also be relevant in the context of discretization and solution techniques which make use of different non-nested meshes. It turns out that the pseudo-L2-projection approximates the actual L2-orthogonal projection best. The obtained results seem to be largely independent of the underlying computational domain; this is demonstrated by four examples (ball, cylinder, half torus and Stanford Bunny).

Many complex systems occurring in various application share the property that theunderlying Markov process remains in certain regions of the state space for long times,and that transitions between such metastable sets occur only rarely.Often the dynamics within each metastable set is of minor importance, but the transitions between these sets are crucial for the behavior and the understanding of the system.Since simulations of the original process are usually prohibitively expensive, the effective dynamics of the system, i.e. the switching between metastable sets, has to be approximated in a reliable way.This is usually done by computing the dominant eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the transferoperator associated to the Markov process. In many real applications, however, the matrix representing the spatially discretized transfer operator can be extremely large, such that approximating eigenvectors and eigenvaluesis a computationally critical problem.In this article we present a novel method to determine the effective dynamics via the transfer operator without computing its dominant spectral elements. The main idea is that a time series of the process allows to approximate the sampling kernel of the process, which is an integral kernel closely related to the transition function of the transfer operator.Metastability is taken into account by representing the approximative sampling kernel by a linear combination of kernels each of which represents the process on one of the metastable sets.The effect of the approximation error on the dynamics of the system is discussed,and the potential of the new approach is illustrated by numerical examples.

We consider a real-analytic compact surface diffeomorphism $f$, for which the tangent space over the non-wandering set $\varOmega$ admits a dominated splitting. We study the dynamical determinant

$$ d_f(z)=\exp-\sum_{n\ge1}\frac{z^n}{n}\sum_{x\in\textrm{Fix}^*f^n}|\textrm{Det}(Df^n(x)-\textrm{Id})|^{-1}, $$

where $\textrm{Fix}^*f^n$ denotes the set of fixed points of $f^n$ with no zero Lyapunov exponents. By combining previous work of Pujals and Sambarino on $C^2$ surface diffeomorphisms with, on the one hand, results of Rugh on hyperbolic analytic maps and, on the other, our two-dimensional version of the same author’s analysis of one-dimensional analytic dynamics with neutral fixed points, we prove that $d_f(z)$ is either an entire function or a holomorphic function in a (possibly multiply) slit plane.

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 37C30; 37D30; 37E30