Deviations of ergodic sums for toral translations II. Boxes

We study the Kronecker sequence $\{n\alpha\}_{n\leq N}$ on the torus ${\mathbb T}^d$ when $\alpha$ is uniformly distributed on ${\mathbb T}^d.$ We show that the discrepancy of the number of visits of this sequence to a random box, normalized by $\ln^d N$, converges as $N\to\infty$ to a Cauchy distribution. The key ingredient of the proof is a Poisson limit theorem for the Cartan action on the space of $d+1$ dimensional lattices.Comment: 56 pages. This is a revised and expanded version of the prior submission

On Small Gaps in the Length Spectrum

We discuss upper and lower bounds for the size of gaps in the length spectrum of negatively curved manifolds. For manifolds with algebraic generators for the fundamental group, we establish the existence of exponential lower bounds for the gaps. On the other hand, we show that the existence of arbitrary small gaps is topologically generic: this is established both for surfaces of constant negative curvature (Theorem 3.1), and for the space of negatively curved metrics (Theorem 4.1). While arbitrary small gaps are topologically generic, it is plausible that the gaps are not too small for almost every metric. One result in this direction is presented in Section 5.Comment: 16 page

Averaging of Hamiltonian flows with an ergodic component

We consider a process on $\mathbb{T}^2$, which consists of fast motion along the stream lines of an incompressible periodic vector field perturbed by white noise. It gives rise to a process on the graph naturally associated to the structure of the stream lines of the unperturbed flow. It has been shown by Freidlin and Wentzell [Random Perturbations of Dynamical Systems, 2nd ed. Springer, New York (1998)] and [Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 109 (1994)] that if the stream function of the flow is periodic, then the corresponding process on the graph weakly converges to a Markov process. We consider the situation where the stream function is not periodic, and the flow (when considered on the torus) has an ergodic component of positive measure. We show that if the rotation number is Diophantine, then the process on the graph still converges to a Markov process, which spends a positive proportion of time in the vertex corresponding to the ergodic component of the flow.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOP372 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Motion in a Random Force Field

We consider the motion of a particle in a random isotropic force field. Assuming that the force field arises from a Poisson field in $\mathbb{R}^d$, $d \geq 4$, and the initial velocity of the particle is sufficiently large, we describe the asymptotic behavior of the particle

Scaling limits of recurrent excited random walks on integers

We describe scaling limits of recurrent excited random walks (ERWs) on integers in i.i.d. cookie environments with a bounded number of cookies per site. We allow both positive and negative excitations. It is known that ERW is recurrent if and only if the expected total drift per site, delta, belongs to the interval [-1,1]. We show that if |delta|<1 then the diffusively scaled ERW under the averaged measure converges to a (delta,-delta)-perturbed Brownian motion. In the boundary case, |delta|=1, the space scaling has to be adjusted by an extra logarithmic term, and the weak limit of ERW happens to be a constant multiple of the running maximum of the standard Brownian motion, a transient process.Comment: 12 page