Invariance principle and rigidity of high entropy measures

Abstract

A deep analysis of the Lyapunov exponents, for stationary sequence of matrices going back to Furstenberg, for more general linear cocycles by Ledrappier and generalized to the context of non-linear cocycles by Avila and Viana, gives an invariance principle for invariant measures with vanishing central exponents. In this paper, we give a new criterium formulated in terms of entropy for the invariance principle and in particular, obtain a simpler proof for some of the known invariance principle results. As a byproduct, we study ergodic measures of partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms whose center foliation is 1-dimensional and forms a circle bundle. We show that for any such C2 diffeomorphism which is accessible, weak hyperbolicity of ergodic measures of high entropy implies that the system itself is of rotation type.