New criteria for ergodicity and nonuniform hyperbolicity (Q654876)

In the mid-nineties of the past century, Pugh and Shub conjectured that stable ergodicity is dense among partial hyperbolic dynamical systems. This paper is a remarkable contribution to this conjecture for the discrete-time case. We recall that for \(\alpha>0\), a \(C^{1+\alpha}\) volume-preserving diffeomorphism is said to be stably ergodic if the exists a \(C^1\)-neighborhood on which every \(C^{1+\alpha}\) volume-preserving diffeomorphism is ergodic. Apart of the long-time known Anosov diffeomorphisms, the first examples of stably ergodic diffeomorphisms outside the hyperbolic world were given in [\textit{M. Grayson} et al., Ann. Math. (2) 140, No. 2, 295--329 (1994; Zbl 0824.58032)] and were defined as the time-one of a geodesic flow on a negative curvature surface. In this example the neutral flow direction generates a non-hyperbolic one-dimensional manifold (central manifold). The contributions towards the previous conjecture always assumed a ``one-dimensionality'' hypothesis on the central bundle. Indeed, we have the result [\textit{F. Rodriguez Hertz} et al., Invent. Math. 172, No. 2, 353--381 (2008; Zbl 1136.37020)] and also [\textit{K. Burns} and \textit{A. Wilkinson}, Ann. Math. (2) 171, No. 1, 451--489 (2010; Zbl 1196.37057)] where it is considered that the central bundle displays the ``bunching condition'' (in rough terms, the central dynamics is conformal, in particular, trivially satisfied if the central bundle is one-dimensional). In the present paper it is proved that (Theorem B), within the volume-preserving discrete-time setting, stable ergodicity is \(C^1\)-dense among partial hyperbolic dynamical systems with a two-dimensional central bundle. In order to obtain this result, the authors establish a new criterion for ergodicity and for the absence of zero Lyapunov exponents (Theorem A). This criterion assures, in brief terms, ergodicity and non-uniform hyperbolicity under the hypothesis of positive measure of stable/unstable-saturated subsets associated to ergodic homoclinic classes. It is interesting to observe that another concept used along the arguments to obtain stable ergodicity is the concept of ``blenders'' that was originally introduced to obtain robust transitivity.