Real Rational Surface Automorphisms : Positivity and Linearity
Abstract
We study the real dynamics of a family of rational surface automorphisms obtained from quadratic birational maps of that preserve a cuspidal cubic and whose critical orbits have lengths with . Passing to the real locus and cutting along the invariant cubic, we obtain a diffeomorphism of an orientable surface whose fundamental group is free. Our key device is a finitely generated invariant, positive semigroup in the fundamental group on which an iterate of induced action acts by concatenation without cancellation. This positivity yields a nonnegative primitive transition matrix, so Perron-Frobenius theory supplies an explicit exponential growth rate for the induced action on the fundamental group. Consequently, the real map has positive topological entropy. We package the combinatorics of the generators in a ``Core-Tail Induction Principle," which allows us to treat simultaneously seven orbit-data families with only finite base checks. Finally, using Bestvina-Handel and the Dehn-Nielsen-Baer correspondence, we show that the induced outer automorphism with odd is realized by a pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism of the cut surface.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.14728,
title = {Real Rational Surface Automorphisms : Positivity and Linearity},
author = {Kyounghee Kim and Insung Park},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.14728},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
The issue with notation has been corrected