Recurrence rate in rapidly mixing dynamical systems

For measure preserving dynamical systems on metric spaces we study the time needed by a typical orbit to return back close to its starting point. We prove that when the decay of correlation is super-polynomial the recurrence rates and the pointwise dimensions are equal. This gives a broad class of systems for which the recurrence rate equals the Hausdorff dimension of the invariant measure

Quantitative recurrence in two-dimensional extended processes

Under some mild condition, a random walk in the plane is recurrent. In particular each trajectory is dense, and a natural question is how much time one needs to approach a given small neighborhood of the origin. We address this question in the case of some extended dynamical systems similar to planar random walks, including \ZZ^2-extension of hyperbolic dynamics. We define a pointwise recurrence rate and relate it to the dimension of the process, and establish a convergence in distribution of the rescaled return times near the origin

Central limit theorem for dimension of Gibbs measures for skew expanding maps

We consider a class of non-conformal expanding maps on the $d$-dimensional torus. For an equilibrium measure of an H\"older potential, we prove an analogue of the Central Limit Theorem for the fluctuations of the logarithm of the measure of balls as the radius goes to zero. An unexpected consequence is that when the measure is not absolutely continuous, then half of the balls of radius \eps have a measure smaller than \eps^\delta and half of them have a measure larger than \eps^\delta, where $\delta$ is the Hausdorff dimension of the measure. We first show that the problem is equivalent to the study of the fluctuations of some Birkhoff sums. Then we use general results from probability theory as the weak invariance principle and random change of time to get our main theorem. Our method also applies to conformal repellers and Axiom A surface diffeomorphisms and possibly to a class of one-dimensional non uniformly expanding maps. These generalizations are presented at the end of the paper

Back to balls in billiards

We consider a billiard in the plane with periodic configuration of convex scatterers. This system is recurrent, in the sense that almost every orbit comes back arbitrarily close to the initial point. In this paper we study the time needed to get back in an r-ball about the initial point, in the phase space and also for the position, in the limit when r->0. We establish the existence of an almost sure convergence rate, and prove a convergence in distribution for the rescaled return times

Large deviations for return times in non-rectangle sets for axiom A diffeomorphisms

For Axiom A diffeomorphisms and equilibrium states, we prove a Large deviations result for the sequence of successive return times into a fixed Borel set, under some assumption on the boundary. Our result relies on and extends the work by Chazottes and Leplaideur who considered cylinder sets of a Markov partition

Hitting and returning into rare events for all alpha-mixing processes

We prove that for any $\alpha$-mixing stationnary process the hitting time of any $n$-string $A_n$ converges, when suitably normalized, to an exponential law. We identify the normalization constant $\lambda(A_n)$. A similar statement holds also for the return time. To establish this result we prove two other results of independent interest. First, we show a relation between the rescaled hitting time and the rescaled return time, generalizing a theorem by Haydn, Lacroix and Vaienti. Second, we show that for positive entropy systems, the probability of observing any $n$-string in $n$ consecutive observations, goes to zero as $n$ goes to infinity

Poisson law for some nonuniformly hyperbolic dynamical systems with polynomial rate of mixing

We consider some nonuniformly hyperbolic invertible dynamical systems which are modeled by a Gibbs-Markov-Young tower. We assume a polynomial tail for the inducing time and a polynomial control of hyperbolicity, as introduced by Alves, Pinheiro and Azevedo. These systems admit a physical measure with polynomial rate of mixing. In this paper we prove that the distribution of the number of visits to a ball B(x, r) converges to a Poisson distribution as the radius r $\to$ 0 and after suitable normalization.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure