Chaos in higher-dimensional complex dynamics 13:10 Fri 20 Apr, 2018 :: Barr Smith South Polygon Lecture theatre :: Finnur Larusson :: University of Adelaide
Media... I will report on new joint work with Leandro Arosio (University of Rome, Tor Vergata). Complex manifolds can be thought of as laid out across a spectrum characterised by rigidity at one end and flexibility at the other. On the rigid side, Kobayashi-hyperbolic manifolds have at most a finite-dimensional group of symmetries. On the flexible side, there are manifolds with an extremely large group of holomorphic automorphisms, the prototypes being the affine spaces $\mathbb C^n$ for $n \geq 2$. From a dynamical point of view, hyperbolicity does not permit chaos. An endomorphism of a Kobayashi-hyperbolic manifold is non-expansive with respect to the Kobayashi distance, so every family of endomorphisms is equicontinuous. We show that not only does flexibility allow chaos: under a strong anti-hyperbolicity assumption, chaotic automorphisms are generic. A special case of our main result is that if $G$ is a connected complex linear algebraic group of dimension at least 2, not semisimple, then chaotic automorphisms are generic among all holomorphic automorphisms of $G$ that preserve a left- or right-invariant Haar form. For $G=\mathbb C^n$, this result was proved (although not explicitly stated) some 20 years ago by Fornaess and Sibony. Our generalisation follows their approach. I will give plenty of context and background, as well as some details of the proof of the main result. |