Beyond primitivity for one-dimensional substitution subshifts and tiling spaces

Abstract

We study the topology and dynamics of subshifts and tiling spaces associated to non-primitive substitutions in one dimension. We identify a property of a substitution, which we call tameness, in the presence of which most of the possible pathological behaviours of non-minimal substitutions cannot occur. We find a characterization of tameness, and use this to prove a slightly stronger version of a result of Durand, which says that the subshift of a minimal substitution is topologically conjugate to the subshift of a primitive substitution. We then extend to the non-minimal setting a result obtained by Anderson and Putnam for primitive substitutions, which says that a substitution tiling space is homeomorphic to an inverse limit of a certain finite graphx under a self-map induced by the substitution. We use this result to explore the structure of the lattice of closed invariant subspaces and quotients of a substitution tiling space, for which we compute cohomological invariants that are stronger that the Čech cohomology of the tiling space alone.

Minor tweaks reflecting referee comments. To appear in Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Topological critical states and anomalous electronic transmittance in one dimensional quasicrystals
• Admissible reversing and extended symmetries for bijective substitutions
• Spectral properties of Schrödinger operators associated to almost minimal substitution systems
• Orbit separation dimension as complexity measure for primitive inflation tilings
• On the minimal components of substitution subshifts
• A simple approach to substitution minimal subshifts
• Automaticity of uniformly recurrent substitutive sequences