Upper frequent hypercyclicity and related notions

Enhancing a recent result of Bayart and Ruzsa we obtain a Birkhoff-type characterization of upper frequently hypercyclic operators and a corresponding Upper Frequent Hypercyclicity Criterion. As an application we characterize upper frequently hypercyclic weighted backward shifts on sequence spaces, which in turn allows us to come up with various counter-examples in linear dynamics that are substantially simpler than those previously obtained in the literature. More generally, we introduce the notion of upper Furstenberg families A and show that our main results hold for the corresponding A -hypercyclic operators.