Pathology and asymmetry: centralizer rigidity for partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms

Abstract: We discover a rigidity phenomenon within the volume-preserving partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms with $1$-dimensional center. In particular, for smooth, ergodic perturbations of certain algebraic systems -- including the discretized geodesic flows over hyperbolic manifolds and certain toral automorphisms with simple spectrum and exactly one eigenvalue on the unit circle, the smooth centralizer is either virtually $\mathbb Z^\ell$ or contains a smooth flow. At the heart of this work are two very different rigidity phenomena. The first was discovered in [2,3] for a class of volume-preserving partially hyperbolic systems including those studied here, the disintegration of volume along the center foliation is either equivalent to Lebesgue or atomic. The second phenomenon is the rigidity associated to several commuting partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms with very different hyperbolic behavior transverse to a common center foliation [25]. We introduce a variety of techniques in the study of higher rank, abelian partially hyperbolic actions: most importantly, we demonstrate a novel geometric approach to building new partially hyperbolic elements in hyperbolic Weyl chambers using Pesin theory and leafwise conjugacy, while we also treat measure rigidity for circle extensions of Anosov diffeomorphisms and apply normal form theory to upgrade regularity of the centralizer.