Global attractors and invariant measures for non-invertible planar piecewise isometric maps

The authors investigate dynamical behaviors of discrete systems defined by iterating non-invertible planar piecewise isometries, which are piecewisely defined maps that preserve Euclidean distance. After discussing subtleties for these kind of dynamical systems, they have characterized global attractors via invariant measures and via positive continuous functions on phase space. The main result of this Letter is that a compact set A is the global attractor for a piecewise isometry if and only if the Lebesgue measure restricted to A is invariant, while it is not invariant restricted to any measurable set B which contains A and whose Lebesgue measure is strictly larger than that of A.