Unique ergodicity, and not, for primitive substitutions on compact alphabets containing isolated points

Abstract

We consider generalised subshifts generated by continuous substitution on compact Hausdorff alphabets. Although primitivity still implies minimality of the subshift generated by the substitution, Durand, Ormes and Petite showed, in contrast to the finite case, that primitivity no longer implies unique ergodicity, by constructing counter-examples with Cantor alphabet. Here we show that, even for the arguably simplest case of the one-point compactification of the natural numbers, primitivity is still insufficient for unique ergodicity, or even the existence of a natural length function. In previous work with Mañibo and Rust we showed that, for irreducible substitutions, unique ergodicity and existence of a natural length function follow from strong power convergence of the renormalised substitution operator \(T\); sufficient criteria were also developed that can sometimes confirm this property. We show a partial converse to this: for irreducible substitutions admitting a natural length function (for instance, all irreducible constant length substitutions), unique ergodicity implies strong power convergence of \(T\). We then consider the case of alphabets with only finitely many accumulation points, showing how upper bounds (and usually an exact formula) for the essential spectral radius of \(T\) can be derived from associated finite substitutions, determined by the behaviour of substitution of the accumulation points. This may sometimes be used to show quasi-compactness of \(T\), and thus unique ergodicity for primitive substitutions. For primitive substitutions of alphabets with at least one isolated point, we show that strong power convergence and quasi-compactness of \(T\) are equivalent and, in fact, that these properties are equivalent to iteration of substitution growing words in length uniformly across all seeds in the alphabet.