Directional Expansiveness for Rd-Actions and for Penrose Tilings

Abstract

We define and study two kinds of directional expansiveness, weak and strong, for an action T of \mathbb{R}^d on a compact metric space X. We show that for \mathbb{R}^2 finite local complexity (FLC) tiling dynamical systems, weak and strong expansiveness are the same, and are both equivalent to a simple coding property. Then we show for the Penrose tiling dynamical system, which is FLC, there are exactly five non expansive directions, the directions perpendicular to the 5th roots of unity. We also study Raphael Robinson's set of 24 Penrose Wang tiles and show the corresponding Penrose Wang tile dynamical system is strictly ergodic. Finally, we study two deformations of the Penrose Wang tile system, one where the square Wang tiles are all deformed into a 2\pi/5 rhombus, and another where they are deformed into a set of eleven tetragon tiles. We show both of these are topologically conjugate to the Penrose tiling dynamical system.