Selection of measures for a potential with two maxima at the zero temperature limit

Abstract

For the subshift of finite type $§=\{0,1,2\}^{\N}$ we study the convergence at temperature zero of the Gibbs measure associated to a non-locally constant Hölder potential which admits only two maximizing measures. These measures are Dirac measures at two different fixed points. The potential is flattest at one of these two fixed points. The question we are interested is: which of these probabilities the invariant Gibbs state will select when temperature goes to zero? We prove that on the one hand the Gibbs measure converges, and at the other hand it does not necessarily converge to the measures where the potential is the flattest. We consider a family of potentials of the above form; for some of them there is the selection of a convex combination of the two Dirac measures, and for others there is a selection of the Dirac measure associated to the flattest point. In the first case this is contrary to what was expected if we consider the analogous problem in Aubry-Mather theory by N. Anantharaman, R. Iturriaga, P. Padilla and H. Sanchez-Morgado. The invariant probability is obtained by the junction of the eigen-function and the eigen-probability. A curious phenomena that happens in our examples is that the eigen-measure and the eigen-function have opposite behavior. When $β\to \infty$, the eigen-measure became exponential bigger around $0^\infty$, when compared to points around $1^\infty$. For the eigen-function the opposite happens.