We study Schrödinger operators with a one-frequency analytic potential, focusing on the transition between the two distinct local regimes characteristic respectively of large and small potentials. From the dynamical point of view, the transition signals the emergence of non-uniform hyperbolicity, so the dependence of the Lyapunov exponent with respect to parameters plays a central role in the analysis. Though often ill-behaved by conventional measures, we show that the Lyapunov exponent is in fact remarkably regular in a “stratified sense” which we define: the irregularity comes from the matching of nice (analytic or smooth) functions along sets with complicated geometry. This result allows us to establish that the “critical set” for the transition lies within countably many codimension one subvarieties of the (infinite-dimensional) parameter space. A more refined renormalization-based analysis shows that the critical set is rather thin within those subvarieties, and allows us to conclude that a typical potential has no critical energies. Such acritical potentials also form an open set and have several interesting properties: only finitely many “phase transitions” may happen, but never at any specific point in the spectrum, and the Lyapunov exponent is minorated in the region of the spectrum where it is positive. On the other hand, we do show that the number of phase transitions can be arbitrarily large.

In this paper, we study time-periodic perturbation of classical systems with two degrees of freedom. A transition chain is established, by passing through small neighborhood of double resonant point, to connect any two cohomology classes corresponding to resonant frequencies. Applying the result to nearly integrable Hamiltonian systems with three degrees of freedom, one obtains a transition chain along which one is able to construct diffusion orbits suggested by Arnold in [A66].

The commonly used spatial entropy hr(U) of the multi-dimensional shift space U is the limit of growth rate of admissible local patterns on finite rectangular sublattices which expands to whole space Zd, d ≥ 2. This work studies spatial entropy hΩ(U) of shift space U on general expanding system Ω = {Ω(n)}∞ n=1 where Ω(n) is increasing finite sublattices and expands to Zd. Ω is called genuinely d-dimensional if Ω(n) contains no lower-dimensional part whose size is comparable to that of its d-dimensional part. We show that hr(U) is the supremum of hΩ(U) for all genuinely two-dimensional Ω. Furthermore, when Ω is genuinely d-dimensional and satisfies certain conditions, then hΩ(U) = hr(U). On the contrary, when Ω(n) contains a lower-dimensional part, then hr(U) < hΩ(U) for some U. Therefore, hr(U) is appropriate to be the d-dimensional spatial entropy.

By constructing an infinite graph-directed iterated iterated function system associated with a finite iterated function system, we develop a new approach for proving the differentiability of the $L^q$-spectrum and establishing the multifractal formalism of certain self-similar measures with overlaps, especially those defined by similitudes with different contraction ratios. We apply our technique to a well-known class of self-similar measures of generalized finite type.

For two-sided topological Markov chains, we show that the set of points for which the two-sided Birkhoff averages of a continuous function diverge is residual. We also show that the set of points for which the Birkhoff averages have a given set of accumulation points other than a singleton is residual. A nontrivial consequence of our results is that the set of points for which the local entropies of an invariant measure on a locally maximal hyperbolic set does not exist is residual. This strongly contrasts to the Shannon–McMillan–Breiman theorem in the context of ergodic theory, which says that local entropies exist on a full measure set.