Chaotic weighted shifts on directed trees

Abstract: We study the dynamical behaviour of weighted backward shift operators defined on sequence spaces over a directed tree. We provide a characterization of chaos on very general Fr\'echet sequence spaces in terms of the existence of a large supply of periodic points, or of fixed points. In the special case of the space $\ell^p$, $1\leq p<\infty$, or the space $c_0$ over the tree, we provide a characterization directly in terms of the weights of the shift operators. It has turned out that these characterizations involve certain generalized continued fractions that are introduced in this paper. Special attention is given to weighted backward shifts with symmetric weights, in particular to Rolewicz operators. In an appendix, we complement our previous work by characterizing hypercyclic and mixing weighted backward shifts on very general Fr\'echet sequence spaces over a tree. Also, some of our results have a close link with potential theory on flows over trees; the link is provided by the notion of capacity, as we explain in an epilogue.