Strongly rigid flows (Q2230905)

A flow is a pair \((X,T)\), where \((X,d)\) is a compact and infinite metric space and \(T\) is an infinite discrete group acting on \(X\). The enveloping semigroup \(E(X,T)\) of \((X,T)\) is defined as the closure of the set \(\{t\colon X\to X\colon t\in T\}\) considered as a subset of \(X^X\) with the product topology. The authors introduce a new class of flows, the strongly rigid flows. A flow \((X,T)\) is said to be \emph{strongly rigid} if every minimal idempotent \(u\in E(X,T)\) is an accumulation point in \( E(X,T)\) with the compact-open topology, i.e., there exists a non-trivial net \(\{t_k\}\) in \(T\) such that the convergence \(t_k\to u\) is uniform. The authors show that the class of strongly rigid flows is properly contained in the class of distal flows and properly contains the class of equicontinuous flows, while the concepts of equicontinuity, strong rigidity and distality coincide for the induced flow \((2^X,T)\) on the hyperspace. They obtain some properties of strongly rigid flows, such as the fact that the strong rigidity is preserved by factors, subsystems and product systems. Further, they study the strong rigidity property in the case of semiflows.