Additive, almost additive and asymptotically additive potential sequences are equivalent

Abstract

Motivated by various applications and examples, the standard notion of potential for dynamical systems has been generalized to almost additive and asymptotically additive potential sequences, and the corresponding thermodynamic formalism, dimension theory and large deviations theory have been extensively studied in the recent years. In this paper, we show that every such potential sequence is actually equivalent to a standard (additive) potential in the sense that there exists a continuous potential with the same topological pressure, equilibrium states, variational principle, weak Gibbs measures, level sets (and irregular set) for the Lyapunov exponent and large deviations properties. In this sense, our result shows that almost and asymptotically additive potential sequences do not extend the scope of the theory compared to standard potentials, and that many results in the literature about such sequences can be recovered as immediate consequences of their counterpart in the additive case. A corollary of our main result is that all quasi-Bernoulli measures are weak Gibbs.