Disjointness in hypercyclicity

We introduce a notion of disjointness for finitely many hypercyclic operators acting on a common space, notion that is weaker than Furstenberg's disjointness of fluid flows. We provide a criterion to construct disjoint hypercyclic operators, that generalizes some well-known connections between the Hypercyclicity Criterion, hereditary hypercyclicity and topological mixing to the setting of disjointness in hypercyclicity. We provide examples of disjoint hypercyclic operators for powers of weighted shifts on a Hilbert space and for differentiation operators on the space of entire functions on the complex plane. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.