Symbolic dynamics for non-uniformly hyperbolic flows

Abstract

We construct symbolic dynamics for non-uniformly hyperbolic flows, in any dimension, possibly with fixed points. More precisely, for each $\chi>0$, we code a set which has full measure for every $\chi$-hyperbolic invariant probability measure that gives zero mass to the set of fixed points. As a main application, we prove that a three dimensional $C^\infty$ flow with positive topological entropy on a closed manifold has finitely many ergodic measures of maximal entropy. For flows in any dimension, we also provide applications to the number of periodic orbits and to the Bernoulli property for equilibrium states of H\"older continuous potentials. The main technical result of this paper is a new method for handling singularities of vector fields by modifying the Riemannian metric. This technique is analogous to a blowup, which allows many results for nonsingular vector fields to be directly applied to vector fields with singularities.