Fourier transforms of Gibbs measures for the Gauss map

Abstract: We investigate under which conditions a given invariant measure $\mu$ for the dynamical system defined by the Gauss map $x \mapsto 1/x \mod 1$ is a Rajchman measure with polynomially decaying Fourier transform $$|\widehat{\mu}(\xi)| = O(|\xi|^{-\eta}), \quad \text{as } |\xi| \to \infty.$$ We show that this property holds for any Gibbs measure $\mu$ of Hausdorff dimension greater than $1/2$ with a natural large deviation assumption on the Gibbs potential. In particular, we obtain the result for the Hausdorff measure and all Gibbs measures of dimension greater than $1/2$ on badly approximable numbers, which extends the constructions of Kaufman and Queff\'elec-Ramar\'e. Our main result implies that the Fourier-Stieltjes coefficients of the Minkowski's question mark function decay to $0$ polynomially answering a question of Salem from 1943. As an application of the Davenport-Erd\H{o}s-LeVeque criterion we obtain an equidistribution theorem for Gibbs measures, which extends in part a recent result by Hochman-Shmerkin. Our proofs are based on exploiting the nonlinear and number theoretic nature of the Gauss map and large deviation theory for Hausdorff dimension and Lyapunov exponents.