Math Seminars

Keith Burns
Northwestern

Ergodicity of partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms


Pugh and Shub have conjectured that a volume preserving partially hyperbolic diffeomorphism is ergodic provided it is accessible, i.e. that any two points are joined by a piecewise smooth path, each leg of which is tangent to a stable or an unstable leaf. I will talk about the proof with Amie Wilkinson of this conjecture under one additional assumption, namely center bunching. Center bunching means that the action of the derivative on the center subbundle is close enough to conformal.