End Behaviour and Ergodicity for Homeomorphisms of Manifolds with Finitely Many Ends

Abstract

The recent paper of Berlanga and Epstein [5] demonstrated the significant role played by the “ends” of a noncompact manifold M in answering questions relating homeomorphisms of M to measures on M. In this paper we show that an analysis of the end behaviour of measure preserving homeomorphisms of a manifold also leads to an understanding of some of their ergodic properties, and allows results previously obtained for compact manifolds to be extended (with qualifications) to the noncompact case. We will show that ergodicity is typical (dense Gδ) with respect to various compact-open topology closed subsets of the space consisting of all homeomorphisms of a manifold M which preserve a measure μ. It may be interesting for topologists to note that we prove when M is a σ-compact connected n-manifold, n≧ 2, then M is the countable union of an increasing family of compact connected manifolds. If M is a PL or smooth manifold, this is well known and easy. If M is just, however, a topological n-manifold then we apply the recent results [9] and [12] to prove the result. The Borel measure μ, is taken to be nonatomic, locally finite, positive on open sets, and zero for the manifold boundary of M.