We provide a new approach to stable ergodicity of systems with dominated splittings, based on a geometrical analysis of global stable and unstable manifolds of hyperbolic points. Our method suggests that the lack of uniform size of Pesin's local stable and unstable manifolds - a notorious problem in the theory of non-uniform hyperbolicity - is often less severe than it appeas to be.
In this paper we obtain two criteria of stable ergodicity outside the partially hyperbolic scenario. In both criteria, we use a weak form of hyperbolicity called chain-hyperbolicity. It is obtained one criterion for diffeomorphisms with dominated splitting and one criterion for weakly partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms. As an application of one of these criteria, we obtain the $C^1$-density of stable ergodicity inside a certain class of weakly partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms.
We prove the stable ergodicity of an example of a volume-preserving, partially hyperbolic diffeomorphism introduced by Pierre Berger and Pablo Carrasco. This example is robustly non-uniformly hyperbolic, with two dimensional center, almost every point has both positive and negative Lyapunov exponents along the center direction and does not admit a dominated splitting of the center direction. The main novelty of our proof is that we do not use accessibility.
We prove that for $r \in \mathbb{N}_{\geq 2} \cup \{\infty\}$, for any dynamically coherent, center bunched and strongly pinched volume preserving $C^r$ partially hyperbolic diffeomorphism $f \colon X \to X$, if either (1) its center foliation is uniformly compact, or (2) its center-stable and center-unstable foliations are of class $C^1$, then there exists a $C^1$-open neighbourhood of $f$ in ${\rm Diff}^r(X,\mathrm{Vol})$, in which stable ergodicity is $C^r$-prevalent in Kolmogorov's sense. In particular, we verify Pugh-Shub's stable ergodicity conjecture in this region. This also provides t…
