Strongly sofic monoids, sofic topological entropy, and surjunctivity

TL;DR

The paper extends sofic theory from groups to monoids by introducing strongly sofic monoids and a corresponding sofic topological entropy for monoid actions. It proves that strong soficity implies surjunctivity and stable finiteness of monoid algebras, and develops a topological conjugacy-invariant entropy framework that applies to shifts and subshifts. These results generalize the Gromov-Weiss surjunctivity and Elek-Szabó stable finiteness theorems to a broader monoid setting and provide structural insight into the hierarchy between embeddable-into-sofic-groups and general sofic monoids.

Abstract

We introduce the class of strongly sofic monoids. This class of monoids strictly contains the class of sofic groups and is a proper subclass of the class of sofic monoids. We define and investigate sofic topological entropy for actions of strongly sofic monoids on compact spaces. We show that sofic topological entropy is a topological conjugacy invariant for such actions and use this fact to prove that every strongly sofic monoid is surjunctive. This means that if $M$ is a strongly sofic monoid and $A$ is a finite alphabet set, then every injective cellular automaton $τ\colon A^M \to A^M$ is surjective. As an application, we prove that the monoid algebra of a strongly sofic monoid with coefficients in an arbitrary field is always stably finite. Our results are extensions to strongly sofic monoids of two previously known properties of sofic groups. The first one is the celebrated Gromov-Weiss theorem asserting that every sofic group is surjunctive. The second is the Elek-Szabó theorem which says that group algebras of sofic groups satisfy Kaplansky's stable finiteness conjecture.

Theorems & Definitions (79)

• Theorem 1.1
• Corollary 1.2
• Corollary 1.3
• Theorem 2.1
• Definition 2.2
• Lemma 2.3
• proof
• Example 2.4
• Example 2.5
• Example 2.6