We consider divergent orbits of the group of diagonal matrices in the space of lattices in Euclidean space. We define two natural numerical invariants of such orbits: the discriminant—an integer—and the type—an integer vector. We then study the question of the limit distributional behavior of these orbits as the discriminant goes to infinity. Using entropy methods we prove that, for divergent orbits of a specific type, virtually any sequence of orbits equidistributes as the discriminant goes to infinity. Using measure rigidity for higher-rank diagonal actions, we complement this result and show that, in dimension three or higher, only very few of these divergent orbits can spend all of their life-span in a given compact set before they diverge.

We study the Furstenberg-entropy realization problem for stationary actions. It is shown that for finitely supported probability measures on free groups, any a priori possible entropy value can be realized as the entropy of an ergodic stationary action. This generalizes results of Bowen. The stationary actions we construct arise via invariant random subgroups (IRSs), based on ideas of Bowen and Kaimanovich. We provide a general framework for constructing a continuum of ergodic IRSs for a discrete group under some algebraic conditions, which gives a continuum of entropy values. Our tools apply, for example, for certain extensions of the group of finitely supported permutations and lamplighter groups, hence establishing full realization results for these groups. For the free group, we construct the IRSs via a geometric construction of subgroups, by describing their Schreier graphs. The analysis of the entropy of these spaces is obtained by studying the random walk on the appropriate Schreier graphs.

We consider the quasi-periodic Fermi–Ulam ping-pong model with no diophantine condition on the frequencies and show that typically the set of initial data which leads to escaping orbits has Lebesgue measure zero.

Let $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ be a finitely generated group acting by probability measure-preserving maps on the standard Borel space $(X,\unicode[STIX]{x1D707})$. We show that if $H\leq \unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ is a subgroup with relative spectral radius greater than the global spectral radius of the action, then $H$ acts with finitely many ergodic components and spectral gap on $(X,\unicode[STIX]{x1D707})$. This answers a question of Shalom who proved this for normal subgroups.

An ergodic probability measure preserving (p.m.p.) equivalence relation ${\mathcal{R}}$ is said to be stable if ${\mathcal{R}}\cong {\mathcal{R}}\times {\mathcal{R}}_{0}$ where ${\mathcal{R}}_{0}$ is the unique hyperfinite ergodic type $\text{II}_{1}$ equivalence relation. We prove that a direct product ${\mathcal{R}}\times {\mathcal{S}}$ of two ergodic p.m.p. equivalence relations is stable if and only if one of the two components ${\mathcal{R}}$ or ${\mathcal{S}}$ is stable. This result is deduced from a new local characterization of stable equivalence relations. The similar question on McDuff $\text{II}_{1}$ factors is also discussed and some partial results are given.

The purpose of this paper is to establish mixing rates for infinite measure preserving almost Anosov diffeomorphisms on the two-dimensional torus. The main task is to establish regular variation of the tails of the first return time to the complement of a neighbourhood of the neutral fixed point.

The transfer operator corresponding to a uniformly expanding map enjoys good spectral properties. We verify that coupling yields explicit estimates that depend continuously on the expansion and distortion constants of the map. For non-uniformly expanding maps with a uniformly expanding induced map, we obtain explicit estimates for mixing rates (exponential, stretched exponential, polynomial) that again depend continuously on the constants for the induced map together with data associated with the inducing time. Finally, for non-uniformly hyperbolic transformations, we obtain the corresponding estimates for rates of decay of correlations.

It is an open question whether the fractional parts of non-linear polynomials at integers have the same fine-scale statistics as a Poisson point process. Most results towards an affirmative answer have so far been restricted to almost sure convergence in the space of polynomials of a given degree. We will here provide explicit Diophantine conditions on the coefficients of polynomials of degree two, under which the convergence of an averaged pair correlation density can be established. The limit is consistent with the Poisson distribution. Since quadratic polynomials at integers represent the energy levels of a class of integrable quantum systems, our findings provide further evidence for the Berry–Tabor conjecture in the theory of quantum chaos.

We define branching systems for finitely aligned higher-rank graphs. From these, we construct concrete representations of higher-rank graph C*-algebras on Hilbert spaces. We prove a generalized Cuntz–Krieger uniqueness theorem for periodic single-vertex 2-graphs. We use this result to give a sufficient condition under which representations of periodic single-vertex 2-graph C*-algebras arising from branching systems are faithful.

Based on the ratio of two block maxima, we propose a large sample test for the length of memory of a stationary symmetric α-stable discrete parameter random field. We show that the power function converges to 1 as the sample-size increases to ∞ under various classes of alternatives having longer memory in the sense of Samorodnitsky (2004). Ergodic theory of nonsingular ℤd-actions plays a very important role in the design and analysis of our large sample test.

In this paper we study the quasi-stationary behavior of absorbed one-dimensional diffusions. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the exponential convergence to a unique quasi-stationary distribution in total variation, uniformly with respect to the initial distribution. An important tool is provided by one-dimensional strict local martingale diffusions coming down from infinity. We prove, under mild assumptions, that their expectation at any positive time is uniformly bounded with respect to the initial position. We provide several examples and extensions, including the sticky Brownian motion and some one-dimensional processes with jumps.

We study an affine two-factor model introduced by Barczy et al. (2014). One component of this two-dimensional model is the so-called α-root process, which generalizes the well-known Cox–Ingersoll–Ross process. In the α = 2 case, this two-factor model was used by Chen and Joslin (2012) to price defaultable bonds with stochastic recovery rates. In this paper we prove exponential ergodicity of this two-factor model when α ∈ (1, 2). As a possible application, our result can be used to study the parameter estimation problem of the model.

In a general setting of an ergodic dynamical system, we give a more accurate calculation of the speed of the recurrence of a point to itself (or to a fixed point). Precisely, we show that for a certain $\unicode[STIX]{x1D709}$ depending on the dimension of the space, $\liminf _{n\rightarrow +\infty }(n\log \log n)^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D709}}d(T^{n}x,x)=0$ almost everywhere and $\liminf _{n\rightarrow +\infty }(n\log \log n)^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D709}}d(T^{n}x,y)=0$ for almost all $x$ and $y$. This is done by assuming the exponential decay of correlations and making a weak assumption on the invariant measure.

Let $F$ be a non-discrete non-Archimedean locally compact field and ${\mathcal{O}}_{F}$ the ring of integers in $F$ . The main results of this paper are the classification of ergodic probability measures on the space $\text{Mat}(\mathbb{N},F)$ of infinite matrices with entries in $F$ with respect to the natural action of the group $\text{GL}(\infty ,{\mathcal{O}}_{F})\times \text{GL}(\infty ,{\mathcal{O}}_{F})$ and the classification, for non-dyadic $F$ , of ergodic probability measures on the space $\text{Sym}(\mathbb{N},F)$ of infinite symmetric matrices with respect to the natural action of the group $\text{GL}(\infty ,{\mathcal{O}}_{F})$ .

In this paper we compute the absorbing time Tn of an n-dimensional discrete-time Markov chain comprising n components, each with an absorbing state and evolving in mutual exclusion. We show that the random absorbing time Tn is well approximated by a deterministic time tn that is the first time when a fluid approximation of the chain approaches the absorbing state at a distance 1 / n. We provide an asymptotic expansion of tn that uses the spectral decomposition of the kernel of the chain as well as the asymptotic distribution of Tn, relying on extreme values theory. We show the applicability of this approach with three different problems: the coupon collector, the erasure channel lifetime, and the coupling times of random walks in high-dimensional spaces.

We introduce a new arithmetic function $a(n)$ defined to be the number of random multiplications by residues modulo $n$ before the running product is congruent to zero modulo $n$. We give several formulas for computing the values of this function and analyze its asymptotic behavior. We find that it is closely related to $P_{1}(n)$, the largest prime divisor of $n$. In particular, $a(n)$ and $P_{1}(n)$ have the same average order asymptotically. Furthermore, the difference between the functions $a(n)$ and $P_{1}(n)$ is $o(1)$ as $n$ tends to infinity on a set with density approximately $0.623$. On the other hand, however, we see that (except on a set of density zero) the difference between $a(n)$ and $P_{1}(n)$ tends to infinity on the integers outside this set. Finally, we consider the asymptotic behavior of the difference between these two functions and find that $\sum _{n\leqslant x}(a(n)-P_{1}(n))\sim (1-\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}/4)\sum _{n\leqslant x}P_{2}(n)$, where $P_{2}(n)$ is the second largest divisor of $n$.

In this paper, we exhibit explicit automorphisms of maximal Salem degree 22 on the supersingular K3 surface of Artin invariant one for all primes $p\equiv 3~\text{mod}\,4$ in a systematic way. Automorphisms of Salem degree 22 do not lift to any characteristic zero model.

The classical theorem of Vizing states that every graph of maximum degree $d$ admits an edge coloring with at most $d+1$ colors. Furthermore, as it was earlier shown by Kőnig, $d$ colors suffice if the graph is bipartite. We investigate the existence of measurable edge colorings for graphings (or measure-preserving graphs). A graphing is an analytic generalization of a bounded-degree graph that appears in various areas, such as sparse graph limits, orbit equivalence and measurable group theory. We show that every graphing of maximum degree $d$ admits a measurable edge coloring with $d+O(\sqrt{d})$ colors; furthermore, if the graphing has no odd cycles, then $d+1$ colors suffice. In fact, if a certain conjecture about finite graphs that strengthens Vizing’s theorem is true, then our method will show that $d+1$ colors are always enough.

Sofic entropy is an invariant for probability-preserving actions of sofic groups. It was introduced a few years ago by Lewis Bowen, and shown to extend the classical Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy from the setting of amenable groups. Some parts of Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy theory generalize to sofic entropy, but in other respects this new invariant behaves less regularly. This paper explores conditions under which sofic entropy is additive for Cartesian products of systems. It is always subadditive, but the reverse inequality can fail. We define a new entropy notion in terms of probability distributions on the spaces of good models of an action. Using this, we prove a general lower bound for the sofic entropy of a Cartesian product in terms of separate quantities for the two factor systems involved. We also prove that this lower bound is optimal in a certain sense, and use it to derive some sufficient conditions for the strict additivity of sofic entropy itself. Various other properties of this new entropy notion are also developed.

Consider a $C^{2}$ family of mixing $C^{4}$ piecewise expanding unimodal maps $t\in [a,b]\mapsto f_{t}$, with a critical point $c$, that is transversal to the topological classes of such maps. Given a Lipchitz observable $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ consider the function

$$\begin{eqnarray}{\mathcal{R}}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}}(t)=\int \unicode[STIX]{x1D719}\,d\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{t},\end{eqnarray}$$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{t}$

$f_{t}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{t}>0$

$t\in [a,b]$

$$\begin{eqnarray}\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{t}^{2}=\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{t}^{2}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719})=\lim _{n\rightarrow \infty }\int \left(\frac{\mathop{\sum }_{j=0}^{n-1}\left(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}\circ f_{t}^{j}-\int \unicode[STIX]{x1D719}\,d\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{t}\right)}{\sqrt{n}}\right)^{2}\,d\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{t}.\end{eqnarray}$$

We show that

$$\begin{eqnarray}m\left\{t\in [a,b]:t+h\in [a,b]\text{ and }\frac{1}{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F9}(t)\sqrt{-\log |h|}}\left(\frac{{\mathcal{R}}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}}(t+h)-{\mathcal{R}}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}}(t)}{h}\right)\leqslant y\right\}\end{eqnarray}$$

$$\begin{eqnarray}\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}}}\int _{-\infty }^{y}e^{-\frac{s^{2}}{2}}\,ds,\end{eqnarray}$$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F9}(t)$

$m$

$[a,b]$

$m([a,b])=1$

${\mathcal{R}}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}}$

$[a,b]$