Topological self-joinings of Cartan actions by toral automorphisms (Q428162)

One of the important topological results in the influential paper of \textit{H. Furstenberg} [Math. Syst. Theory 1, 1--49 (1967; Zbl 0146.28502)] is that a closed subset of the circle invariant under two multiplicatively independent endomorphisms like \(x\mapsto 2x\) and \(x\mapsto 3x\) must be finite or the whole circle. \textit{D. Berend} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 286, 505--535 (1984; Zbl 0523.22004)] extended this to actions of semigroups by endomorphisms of compact abelian groups, characterising this topological rigidity. More generally, topological rigidity means that closed invariant sets are either infinite or unions of translates of closed subgroups. Here the setting considered is faithful \(\mathbb Z^r\) actions by automorphisms of the torus \(\mathbb T^d\) that are Cartan in the sense that the image subgroup of \(\mathrm{GL}_d(\mathbb Z)\) defined by the action has no larger abelian subgroup and contains an irreducible element. For such actions, under the additional assmption that some element is totally irreducible, the natural diagonal action on \(\mathbb T^d\times\mathbb T^d\) has strong topological rigidity properties for \(r\geq3\) but not for \(r=2\).