Twisted cocycle for interval exchange transformations: Invariant structures and Lyapunov spectrum

Abstract

This paper investigates the algebraic and dynamical properties of the twisted cocycle, a $\mathrm{GL}(d, \mathbb{C})$-valued cocycle defined over the toral extension of the Zorich (Rauzy-Veech) renormalization for interval exchange transformations (IET). As a natural generalization of the Zorich cocycle, the twisted cocycle plays a central role in studying the asymptotic growth of twisted Birkhoff sums which in turn provide a suitable tool for obtaining fine spectral information about IETs and translation flows such as the local dimension of spectral measures and quantitative weak mixing. Although it shares similarities with the classical (untwisted) Zorich cocycle, structural differences make its analysis more challenging. Our results yield a block-form decomposition into invariant and covariant subbundles allowing us to demonstrate the existence of $\kappa+1$ zero exponents with respect to a large class of natural invariant measures where $\kappa$ is an explicit integer depending on the permutation. We establish the symmetry of the Lyapunov spectrum by showing the existence of a family of non-degenerate invariant symplectic forms. As a corollary, we prove that for rotation-type permutations, the twisted cocycle has a degenerate Lyapunov spectrum with respect to certain natural ergodic invariant measures in contrast with the higher genus case where the existence of at least one positive Lyapunov exponent is guaranteed by previous work of the authors. In the appendix, we apply our result about the invariant section to substitution systems and prove the pure singularity of the spectrum for a substantially large class of substitutions on two letters, while greatly simplifying the proof for some systems previously known to have this property.