On the centralizer of vector fields: criteria of triviality and genericity results

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the question of whether a typical vector field on a compact connected Riemannian manifold $M^d$ has a `small' centralizer. In the $C^1$ case, we give two criteria, one of which is $C^1$-generic, which guarantees that the centralizer of a $C^1$-generic vector field is indeed small, namely \textit{collinear}. The other criterion states that a $C^1$ \textit{separating} flow has a collinear $C^1$-centralizer. When all the singularities are hyperbolic, we prove that the collinearity property can actually be promoted to a stronger one, refered as \textit{quasi-triviality}. In particular, the $C^1$-centralizer of a $C^1$-generic vector field is quasi-trivial. In certain cases, we obtain the triviality of the centralizer of a $C^1$-generic vector field, which includes $C^1$-generic Axiom A (or sectional Axiom A) vector fields and $C^1$-generic vector fields with countably many chain recurrent classes. For sufficiently regular vector fields, we also obtain various criteria which ensure that the centralizer is \textit{trivial} (as small as it can be), and we show that in higher regularity, collinearity and triviality of the $C^d$-centralizer are equivalent properties for a generic vector field in the $C^d$ topology. We also obtain that in the non-uniformly hyperbolic scenario, with regularity $C^2$, the $C^1$-centralizer is trivial.