Angels' staircases, Sturmian sequences, and trajectories on homothety surfaces

affine interval exchange Angel's staircase continued fraction cutting sequence geodesic Hausdorff dimension homothety surface lamination Sturmian sequence Veech group

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Dynamical systems of geometric origin and hyperbolicity (geodesic and horocycle flows, etc.) (37D40) Dynamical systems involving maps of the interval (37E05) Flows on surfaces (37E35) Rotation numbers and vectors (37E45) Affine differential geometry (53A15)

Abstract: A homothety surface can be assembled from polygons by identifying their edges in pairs via homotheties, which are compositions of translation and scaling. We consider linear trajectories on a 1-parameter family of genus-2 homothety surfaces. The closure of a trajectory on each of these surfaces always has Hausdorff dimension 1, and contains either a closed loop or a lamination with Cantor cross-section. Trajectories have cutting sequences that are either eventually periodic or eventually Sturmian. Although no two of these surfaces are affinely equivalent, their linear trajectories can be related directly to those on the square torus, and thence to each other, by means of explicit functions. We also briefly examine two related families of surfaces and show that the above behaviors can be mixed; for instance, the closure of a linear trajectory can contain both a closed loop and a lamination.

Review text

The authors study trajectories in a particular family of homothety surfaces. Let us recall that a {homothety surface}, also known as dilation surface, is a surface whose atlas has changes of coordinates consisting in homotheties (there is variation of the notion according to whether or not negative dilation factors are allowed; in this article, they are not). This notion generalizes for instance the notion of translation surface. A trajectory is a path going at constant speed and direction in charts. Since the direction is invariant by change of chart, the direction of a trajectory is a well-defined quantity. Trajectories come in families indexed by the direction in \(2\pi\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}\) or \(\pi\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}\). Homothety surfaces have genus 2 and depend on one parameter. Their trajectories are in close correspondence with trajectories on the flat torus, a translation surface. The correspondence is not a bijection. More precisely for each non-vertical direction, the return map on some precise segment, is a rather simple affine interval exchange map with constant contracting derivative, and is semi-conjugated to a rotation on the circle. The semi-conjugacy is a Devil's staicase type function, whose inverse has interesting explicit expressions as infinite series. The rotation number of the corresponding rotation depends on the parameter in a Devil's staircase way too, and the inverse of this correspondence can also be expressed as infinite series. These inverses are dubbed \textit{Angel's staircase} by the authors. As the authors explain, these expressions have appeared in previous works by others, not necessarily in the context of the flow on an affine surface. The authors recall and prove many properties and show beautiful examples of their graphs. With these tools, and using cutting sequences (i.e., the set of sides encountered by a trajectory, where the sides refer to a particular presentation of the surface as a quotient of two identical rectangles), which turn out to be Sturmian sequences in most cases in their family because of the correspondence with the torus, they are able to prove a classification theorem of trajectories and to give information on the set of slopes for which each type of trajectory closure occurs. In short, on an open subset \(U\) of the circle of directions \(\theta\), of complement a Cantor set of Hausdorff dimension 0, there is an open dense set of trajectories of direction \(\theta\) that are attracted to a single cycle that depends on \(\theta\). On the complement of this set of directions, outside the countable set of endpoints of the intervals composing \(U\), there is an attracting Cantor lamination of Hausdorff dimension \(0\).

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