Accessibility and homology bounded strong unstable foliation for Anosov diffeomorphisms on 3-torus (Q520411)

The authors give equivalent conditions for the non-accessibility of an Anosov diffeomorphism on the 3-torus with a partially hyperbolic splitting. This gives a negative answer to \textit{A. Hammerlindl}'s question [Ergodic Theory Dyn. Syst. 33, No. 3, 896--933 (2013; Zbl 1390.37051), p. 905] about homology boundedness of a strong unstable foliation. The authors focus on a diffeomorphism on \(\mathbb{T}^3\) satisfying the following two conditions: (i) \(f\) is Anosov, i.e., there exists a hyperbolic splitting \(T \mathbb{T}^3 = G^s \oplus G^u\) (say, \(\dim G^u = 2\)), and (ii) there exists a dominated splitting \(G^u = E^c \oplus E^u\). Or, equivalently, \(f\) has a partially hyperbolic splitting \(T \mathbb{T}^3 = E^s \oplus E^c \oplus E^u\) such that \(E^c\) is uniformly expanding, where \(E^s = G^s\). We say that a partially hyperbolic diffeomorphism \(f\) is accessible if for any two points \(x\), \(y \in \mathbb{T}^3\), there exists a \(us\)-path connecting \(x\) and \(y\), i.e., there is a \(C^1\) path from \(x\) to \(y\) whose tangent vector always lies in \(E^u \cup E^s\) and vanishes at most finitely many times. It is stated in the text that accessibility is very important in the study of the stable ergodicity conjecture. Let \(f\) be as above. Then \(f\) is topologically conjugate to a linear Anosov automorphism \(A : \mathbb{T}^3 \to \mathbb{T}^3\), i.e., there exists a homeomorphism \(h : \mathbb{T}^3 \to \mathbb{T}^3\) such that \(h\) is homotopic to the identity and \(h \circ f = A \circ h\) (we will use the same symbol \(A\) to denote the matrix acting on \(\mathbb{R}^3\) which induces the linear Anosov diffeomorphism). It is known that \(A\) also has a partially hyperbolic splitting: \(T \mathbb{T}^3 = E^s_A \oplus E^c_A \oplus E^u_A\) such that \(E^c_A\) is expanding. Let \(F\), \(H : \mathbb{R}^3 \to \mathbb{R}^3\) be lifts of \(f\), \(h\) respectively, i.e., \(\pi \circ F = f \circ \pi\), \(\pi \circ H = h \circ \pi\) such that \(H \circ F = A \circ H\). Since \(h\) is homotopic to the identity, there exists \(K >0\) such that for any \(x \in \mathbb{R}^3\), \(|H(x) - x| \leq K\). Denote by \(E^{cs} = E^c \oplus E^s\) and \(E^{cu} = E^c \oplus E^u\). It is well known that there exist invariant foliations \(\mathcal{F}^\sigma_f\) tangent to \(E^\sigma_f\) for \(\sigma = s, c, u, cs, cu\). The main result is the following. Let \(f : \mathbb{T}^3 \to \mathbb{T}^3\) be a diffeomorphism on \(\mathbb{T}^3\) satisfying (i) and (ii). Then the following four conditions are equivalent: 1) \(f\) is not accessible; 2) \(E^s_f \oplus E^u_f\) is integrable; 3) for any \(x \in \mathbb{T}^3\), \(h(\mathcal{F}^u_f (x)) = \mathcal{F}^u_A(h(x))\); 4) \(\mathcal{F}^u_F\) is homology bounded. Since accessibility is \(C^r\) \((r \geq 1)\) dense, the authors obtain, as a corollary, that there exists a partially hyperbolic Anosov \(C^\infty\) diffeomorphism on \(\mathbb{T}^3\) whose strong unstable foliation is not homology bounded. This gives a negative answer to Hammerlindl's question.