Small cocycles, fine torus fibrations, and a ${\mathbb Z}^2$ subshift with neither

Abstract

Following an earlier similar conjecture of Kellendonk and Putnam, Giordano, Putnam and Skau conjectured that all minimal, free ${\mathbb Z}^d$ actions on Cantor sets admit "small cocycles." These represent classes in $H^1$ that are mapped to small vectors in ${\mathbb R}^d$ by the Ruelle-Sullivan (RS) map. We show that there exist ${\mathbb Z}^d$ actions where no such small cocycles exist, and where the image of $H^1$ under RS is ${\mathbb Z}^d$. Our methods involve tiling spaces and shape deformations, and along the way we prove a relation between the image of RS and the set of "virtual eigenvalues," i.e. elements of ${\mathbb R}^d$ that become topological eigenvalues of the tiling flow after an arbitrarily small change in the shapes and sizes of the tiles.

Updated with additional text to clarify some difficult or ambiguous statements. Title changed to emphasize that our counterexample is in dimension 2