The number of ergodic measures for transitive subshifts under the regular bispecial condition

Abstract

AbstractIf $\mathcal {A}$ is a finite set (alphabet), the shift dynamical system consists of the space $\mathcal {A}^{\mathbb {N}}$ of sequences with entries in $\mathcal {A}$ , along with the left shift operator S. Closed S-invariant subsets are called subshifts and arise naturally as encodings of other systems. In this paper, we study the number of ergodic measures for transitive subshifts under a condition (‘regular bispecial condition’) on the possible extensions of words in the associated language. Our main result shows that under this condition, the subshift can support at most $({K+1})/{2}$ ergodic measures, where K is the limiting value of $p(n+1)-p(n)$ , and p is the complexity function of the language. As a consequence, we answer a question of Boshernitzan from 1984, providing a combinatorial proof for the bound on the number of ergodic measures for interval exchange transformations.