A converse statement to Hutchinson's theorem and a dimension gap for self-affine measures

Abstract: A well-known theorem of J.E. Hutchinson states that if an iterated function system consists of similarity transformations and satisfies the open set condition then its attractor supports a self-similar measure with Hausdorff dimension equal to the similarity dimension. In this article we prove the following result which may be regarded as a form of partial converse: if an iterated function system consists of invertible affine transformations whose linear parts do not preserve a common invariant subspace, and its attractor supports a self-affine measure with Hausdorff dimension equal to the affinity dimension, then the system necessarily consists of similarity transformations. We obtain this result by showing that the equilibrium measures of an affine iterated function system are never Bernoulli measures unless the system either is reducible or consists of similarity transformations. The proof builds on earlier results in the thermodynamic formalism of affine iterated function systems due to Bochi, Feng, K\"aenm\"aki, Shmerkin and the first named author and also relies on the work of Benoist on the spectral properties of Zariski-dense subsemigroups of reductive linear groups.