Pisot units, Salem numbers and higher dimensional projective manifolds with primitive automorphisms of positive entropy

We show that, in any dimension greater than one, there are an abelian variety, a smooth rational variety and a Calabi-Yau manifold, with primitive birational automorphisms of first dynamical degree $>1$. We also show that there are smooth complex projective Calabi-Yau manifolds and smooth rational manifolds, of any even dimension, with primitive biregular automorphisms of positive topological entropy.