Weak Gibbs Measures: Speed of Convergence to Entropy, Topological and Geometrical Aspects

Abstract. In this paper we obtain exponential large deviation bounds in the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman convergence formula for entropy in the case of weak Gibbs measures and topologically mixing subshifts of finite type. We also prove almost sure estimates for the error term in the convergence to entropy given by Shannon-McMillan-Breiman formula for both uniformly and non-uniformly expanding shifts. Finally we establish a topological characterization of large deviations bounds for Gibbs measures and deduce some of their topological and geometrical aspects: the local entropy is zero and the topological pressure of positive measure sets is total. Some applications include large deviation estimates for Lyapunov exponents, pointwise dimension and slow return times.