Smooth interval maps have symbolic extensions (Q1030525)

Let \(X\) be the circle or the interval \([0,1]\) and let \(f:X\rightarrow X\) be a \(C^r\) map, \(r<1\). A symbolic extension of \(f\) is an invertible shift map \(\sigma :\Sigma \rightarrow \Sigma\) on a finite alphabet, such that there is a continuous surjective map \(\pi :\Sigma \rightarrow X\) such that \(\pi \circ \sigma=f\circ \pi\). The paper under review deals with the problem of finding symbolic extensions which minimize the topological entropy for \(C^r\) maps. The main result is composed by the following ingredients. For an invariant measure \(\mu\) of \(f\), let \(h_{\mu}(f)\) be the metric entropy of \(f\) respect to \(\mu\) and let \(h_{sex}(\mu)=\inf _{\pi} \sup _{\nu \in \pi ^{-1}(\mu)}h_{\nu}(\sigma)\). Let \(\chi (\mu)=\int \log |f'|d\mu\) (note that in case that ergodicity of \(\mu\), \(\chi (\mu)\) is the Lyapunov exponent of \(\mu\)). Finally, let \(\overline {\chi}_0(\mu)=\int \max \{ 0,\chi \} dM_{\mu}\), where \(M_{\mu}\) is the unique probability on the ergodic measures which gives the ergodic decomposition \(\mu =\int \tau dM_{\mu}(\tau)\). After these ingredients, the main result states that for a \(C^r\) interval or circle map \(f\) which have \(\mu\) as invariant measure, the inequality \(h_{sex}(\mu)\leq h_{\mu}(f)+\overline {\chi}_0(\mu)/(r-1)\). In terms of topological entropy, the main result allows to prove the following corollary. Let \(R(f)=\lim _{n\rightarrow \infty} 1/n \cdot \log \sup _{x\in X} |(f^n)'(x)|\) and let \(h_{sex}(f)=sup _{mu}h_{sex}(\mu)\). Then \(h_{sex}(f)=h(f)+\max \{ 0, R(f)/(r-1)\}\), where \(h(f)\) denotes the topological entropy of \(f\). The paper proves a conjecture stated by one of the authors.