Measures of maximal entropy for Markovian dynamics on the Gehman dendrite

Abstract

We study transitive dynamical systems on the Gehman dendrite $\mathcal{G}$ for which the endpoint set $\mathrm{End}(\mathcal{G})$ is invariant. Our goal is to approximate such systems by maps whose measure-theoretic behaviour at maximal entropy is governed by an explicit countable Markov structure. We introduce a class of Markovian maps, encode their dynamics by countable Markov graphs, and use the criteria of Vere-Jones, Gurevich, Salama and Ruette to control the existence of measures of maximal entropy. The main theorem gives two arbitrarily close mixing Markovian perturbations of any given system in the considered class: one has a unique measure of maximal entropy, while the other has none.