Omri Sarig, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor Omri Sarig, Committee Chair/Co-Chair Anatole Katok, Committee Member Yakov B Pesin, Committee Member John Fricks, Committee Member
In this work we investigate questions relating to the existence, commonness and thermodynamic formalism of countable Markov shifts exhibiting the phenomenon of transience. We obtain a complete answer to the question of which countable Markov shifts have transient potentials and give a topological description of their commonness within the set of all potentials of summable variations and finite (Gurevich) pressure. Finally we investigate the thermodynamic formalism of transient Markov shifts. In the locally compact case it is shown that a conformal measure and (generalized) thermodynamic limit always exist.
