Graph towers, laminations and their invariant measures

Abstract

In this paper we present a combinatorial machinery, consisting of a graph tower $\overleftarrow \Gamma$ and vector towers $\overleftarrow v$ on $\overleftarrow \Gamma$, which allows us to efficiently describe all invariant measures $\mu = \mu^{\overleftarrow v}$ on any given shift space over a finite alphabet. The new technology admits a number of direct applications, in particular concerning invariant measures on non-primitive substitution subshifts, minimal subshifts with many ergodic measures, or an efficient calculation of the measure of a given cylinder. It also applies to currents on a free group $F_N$, and in particular the set of projectively fixed currents under the action of a (possibly reducible) endomorphism $\varphi: F_N \to F_N$ is determined, when $\varphi$ is represented by a train track map.