The Hausdorff and dynamical dimensions of self-affine sponges: a dimension gap result (Q1675271)

Whether every expanding repeller has an ergodic invariant measure of full Hausdorff dimension is a long-standing open problem in the dimension theory of dynamical systems. In the present paper, the authors give a negative answer to this important problem by constructing a piecewise affine expanding repeller in \(\mathbb R^3\) topologically conjugate to the full shift whose Hausdorff dimension is strictly greater than its dynamical dimension, the supremum of the Hausdorff dimensions of its invariant measures. The repeller they construct is a self-affine sponge, more exactly, a Barański sponge. The main idea of the paper is to show that the Hausdorff dimension of a self-affine sponge is the supremum of the Hausdorff dimensions of certain nice non-invariant measures, the so-called ``pseudo-Bernoulli'' measures, and to show that the dimension of these measures is sometimes larger than the dimension of any invariant measure. What happens in dimension two is still open. Some other interesting natural questions are also raised at the end of the paper.