Dynamics of spacing shifts

Abstract

Spacing subshifts were introducedby Lau and Zame in 1973 to provide accessible examples of maps that are (topologically) weakly mixing but not mixing. Although they show a rich variety of dynamical characteristics, they have received little subsequent attention in the dynamical systems literature. This paper is a systematic study of their dynamical properties and shows that they may be used to provide examples of dynamical systems with a huge range of interesting dynamical behaviors. In a later paper we propose to consider in more detail the case when spacing subshifts are also sofic and transitive.