Energy and Invariant Measures for Birational Surface Maps

Abstract

When a birational surface map is expanding on cohomology there is a canonical way to associate positive closed currents to the map and its inverse. In this paper we use a version of Dirichlet energy to construct the wedge product of these two currents under a very weak additional condition on the map. We show that the resulting measure is invariant and mixing, and we establish that its Lyapunov exponents are finite and non-zero.