Topological Entropy, Sets of Periods, and Transitivity for Circle Maps

Abstract

Transitivity, the existence of periodic points, and positive topological entropy can be used to characterize complexity in dynamical systems. It is known that, for every graph that is not a tree and any ε > 0, there exist (complicated) totally transitive maps (then with cofinite set of periods) such that the topological entropy is smaller than ε (simplicity). To numerically measure the complexity of the set of periods, we introduce a notion of the boundary of cofiniteness. Larger boundary of cofiniteness corresponds to a simpler set of periods. We show that, for any continuous circle maps of degree one, every totally transitive (and, hence, robustly complicated) map with small topological entropy has arbitrarily large (simplicity) boundary of cofiniteness.