Advances on Stable Ergodicity of Toral Automorphisms

We prove that all ergodic automorphisms of the $N$-dimensional torus with two dimensional center are stably ergodic. This includes all ergodic automorphisms in dimension $N\le 5$ or $N=7$. This generalizes a previous result of Rodriguez-Hertz, that required an additional algebraic condition on the carachteristic polynomial of the linear automorphism. The core of the proof is a minimality criterion.