Resonant forms at zero for dissipative Anosov flows

Abstract

We study resonant differential forms at zero for transitive Anosov flows on $3$-manifolds. We pay particular attention to the dissipative case, that is, Anosov flows that do not preserve an absolutely continuous measure. Such flows have two distinguished Sinai-Ruelle-Bowen $3$-forms, $\Omega_{\text{SRB}}^{\pm}$, and the cohomology classes $[\iota_{X}\Omega_{\text{SRB}}^{\pm}]$ (where $X$ is the infinitesimal generator of the flow) play a key role in the determination of the space of resonant $1$-forms. When both classes vanish we associate to the flow a $\textit{helicity}$ that naturally extends the classical notion associated with null-homologous volume preserving flows. We provide a general theory that includes horocyclic invariance of resonant $1$-forms and SRB-measures as well as the local geometry of the maps $X\mapsto [\iota_{X}\Omega_{\text{SRB}}^{\pm}]$ near a null-homologous volume preserving flow. Next, we study several relevant classes of examples. Among these are thermostats associated with holomorphic quadratic differentials, giving rise to quasi-Fuchsian flows as introduced by Ghys. For these flows we compute explicitly all resonant $1$-forms at zero, we show that $[\iota_{X}\Omega_{\text{SRB}}^{\pm}]=0$ and give an explicit formula for the helicity. In addition we show that a generic time change of a quasi-Fuchsian flow is semisimple and thus the order of vanishing of the Ruelle zeta function at zero is $-\chi(M)$, the same as in the geodesic flow case. In contrast, we show that if $(M,g)$ is a closed surface of negative curvature, the Gaussian thermostat driven by a (small) harmonic $1$-form has a Ruelle zeta function whose order of vanishing at zero is $-\chi(M)-1$.