Hidden Gibbs measures on shift spaces over countable alphabets

Abstract: We study the thermodynamic formalism for particular types of sub-additive sequences on a class of subshifts over countable alphabets. The subshifts we consider include factors of irreducible countable Markov shifts under certain conditions. We show the variational principle for topological pressure. We also study conditions for the existence and uniqueness of invariant ergodic Gibbs measures and the uniqueness of equilibrium states. As an application, we extend the theory of factors of (generalized) Gibbs measures on subshifts on finite alphabets to that on certain subshifts over countable alphabets.