Tree-Shifts: Irreducibility, mixing, and the chaos of tree-shifts

Abstract

Topological behavior, such as chaos, irreducibility, and mixing of a one-sided shift of finite type, is well elucidated. Meanwhile, the investigation of multidimensional shifts, for instance, textile systems is difficult and only a few results have been obtained so far. This paper studies shifts defined on infinite trees, which are called tree-shifts. Infinite trees have a natural structure of one-sided symbolic dynamical systems equipped with multiple shift maps and constitute an intermediate class in between one-sided shifts and multidimensional shifts. We have shown not only an irreducible tree-shift of finite type, but also a mixing tree-shift that are chaotic in the sense of Devaney. Furthermore, the graph and labeled graph representations of tree-shifts are revealed so that the verification of irreducibility and mixing of a tree-shift is equivalent to determining the irreducibility and mixing of matrices, respectively. This extends the classical results of one-sided symbolic dynamics. A necessary and sufficient condition for the irreducibility and mixing of tree-shifts of finite type is demonstrated. Most important of all, the examination can be done in finite steps with an upper bound.