Automorphisms of rational manifolds of positive entropy with Siegel disks (Q661145)

The Cremona group, the birational automorphism group of \(\mathbb{P}^n\), is one of the most intricate objects of algebraic geometry. Special elements of the Cremona group are automorphisms of rational manifolds. The article shows surprising examples of such automorphisms. More precisely, it shows automorphisms that have positive topological entropy and also Siegel disks. Roughly speaking, entropy measures how fast orbits are diverging from each other. On the other hand, Siegel disks are invariant disks around a fixed point with special arithmetic properties: the eigenvalues at the fixed point are multiplicatively independent complex numbers of length one. A Siegel disk is arithmetic if these eigenvalues are algebraic integers. Hence an automorphism with both positive entropy and Siegel disks is surprising, because orbits are diverging fast, and staying inside special disks at the same time. Automorphisms of rational surfaces with positive entropy and one Siegel disk have been constructed earlier by McMullen. The article gives, using McMullen's construction, examples of automorphisms of rational manifolds that have arbitrarily many arithmetic Siegel disks. However, the authors have to pass to higher dimensions: the dimension is assumed to be at least 4. In dimension 3 an example with two arithmetic Siegel disks is given. The construction of the article uses the product of McMullen's surface automorphism with a diagonal automorphism of the projective space. The entropy then is the same as the entropy of McMullen's example, by a lemma of the article showing that taking the product with a toric automorphism does not change the entropy. For that an alternative description of the entropy is used: it is the spectral radius of the action on the even degree cohomology ring. Hence these products have a positive entropy. To conclude the construction, a smart choice of diagonal automorphism of the projective space yields Siegel disks around some of the fixed points.