Flow Equivalence of Shift Spaces

Abstract

We study two problems related to flow equivalence of shift spaces. The first problem, the classification of $S$-gap shifts up to flow equivalence, is partially solved with the establishment of a new invariant for the sofic $S$-gap shifts and a complete classification of the non-sofic $S$-gap shifts. The second problem is an examination of the entropy of shift spaces under flow equivalence. For a wide array of classes of shift spaces with non-zero entropy, it is shown that the entropies achievable while maintaining flow equivalence are dense in $\mathbb R^+$.