Joinings of higher rank torus actions on homogeneous spaces (Q2418566)

\textit{H. Furstenberg} [Math. Syst. Theory 1, 1--49 (1967; Zbl 0146.28502)] introduced the use of joinings as a tool for understanding structural questions in ergodic theory. For example, a non-trivial factor of a measure-preserving system gives rise to a non-trivial joining of the system with itself. He also initiated the study of a specific sort of rigidity phenomenon, in which a (semi-)group action may have the property that each individual element of the action has a vast diversity of invariant closed sets or invariant probability measures while the action as a whole has very few invariant closed sets or invariant probability measures that are in principle describable in algebraic terms. Both of these ideas have proved to be important and fruitful, and rigidity phenomena concerning invariant measures or joinings of pairs of systems are closely related. A paucity of joinings, or a constraint on their structure, is associated to measure rigidity phenomena and to strong equidistribution properties. Here a fairly general class of higher-rank actions on \(S\)-arithmetic quotients of semi-simple and, more generally, perfect linear algebraic groups is studied, and the main result is that joinings of such systems must be algebraic. This is a very strong and general manifestation of measure rigidity for such systems. While the helicopter view of this work is familiar -- individual elements exhibit no rigidity, but the higher rank action does; there is a presence of positive entropy (this is innate in the joinings rigidity setting, and is a -- conjecturally unnecessary -- hypothesis in the measure rigidity setting); many ideas are brought to bear for the problem at hand. Establishing joinings rigidity for higher-rank abelian algebraic dynamical systems (that is, abelian groups acting on homogeneous spaces) is a special case of the general problem of classifying invariant measures for such actions. In the setting considered here, in addition to the presence of some positive entropy, there is additional structure available in the foliations whose leaves are obtained by intersecting unstable foliations of finitely many elements of the action. This is used alongside sophisticated arguments from homogeneous dynamics to arrive at the main theorems, giving a complete reduction of the classification of joinings in this setting to an algebraic question. As the authors indicate, the wide scope of the rigidity phenomena shown here means there will be many applications to arithmetic equidistribution and Diophantine problems.