We show that certain billiard flows on planar billiard tables with horns can be modeled as suspension flows over Young towers with exponential tails. Because the height function of the suspension flow itself is polynomial when the horns are Torricelli-like trumpets, one can derive Limit Laws for the billiard flow, including Stable Limits if the parameter of the Torricelli trumpet is chosen in $(1,2)$.
We construct families of two-dimensional Sinai billiards whose transfer operators have Ruelle resonances arbitrarily close to 1. Our method involves taking a large enough cover of an initial billiard table, and relating the transfer operator of the covering table to twisted transfer operators of the initial table. We also study the distribution of these resonances which are close to 1.
We study the rate of mixing of observables of Z^d-extensions of probability preserving dynamical systems. We explain how this question is directly linked to the local limit theorem and establish a rate of mixing for general classes of observables of the Z^2-periodic Sinai billiard. We compare our approach with the induction method.
The Lorentz gas of $\mathbb{Z}^2$-periodic scatterers (or the so called Sinai billiards) can be used to model motion of electrons on an ionized medal. We investigate the linear response for the system under various external forces (during both the flight and the collision). We give some characterizations under which the forced system is time-reversible, and derive an estimate of the electrical current generated by the forced system. Moreover, applying Pesin entropy formula and Young dimension formula, we get several characterizations of the non-equilibrium steady state of the forced system.
Markov partitions designed by Sinai(1968) and Bowen(1970) proved to be an efficient tool for descibing statistical properties of uniformly hyperbolic systems. For hyperbolic systems with singularities, in particular, for hyperbolic billiards the construction of a Markov partition by Bunimovich and Sinai(1980) was a delicate and hard task. Therefore later more and more flexible and simple variants of Markov partitions appeared: Markov sieves (Bunimovich-Chernov-Sinai, 1990), Markov towers (Young, 1998), standard pairs (Dolgopyat). This remarkable evolution of Sinai's original idea is surveyed i…
We investigate the question of the rate of mixing for observables of a Z d-extension of a probability preserving dynamical system with good spectral properties. We state general mixing results, including expansions of every order. The main part of this article is devoted to the study of mixing rate for smooth observables of the Z 2-periodic Sinai billiard, with different kinds of results depending on whether the horizon is finite or infinite. We establish a first order mixing result when the horizon is infinite. In the finite horizon case, we establish an asymptotic expansion of every order, e…
A CAT(0)-approach to the marked length spectral rigidity of Sinai billiards
Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição - UFABC（计算与认知数学中心 - 联邦 ABC大学）；Centre de Mathématiques Laurent Schwartz - École Polytechnique（洛朗·施瓦茨数学中心 - 巴黎综合理工学院）
Statistical equilibration of energies in a slow-fast system is a fundamental open problem in physics. In a recent paper, it was shown that the equilibration rate in a springy billiard can remain strictly positive in the limit of vanishing mass ratio (of the particle and billiard wall) when the frozen billiard has more than one ergodic components [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 114, E10514 (2017)]. In this paper, using the model of a springy Sinai billiard, it is shown that this can happen even in the case where the frozen billiard has a single ergodic component, but when the time of ergodization i…
For Dynamical Systems, a strong bound on multiple correlations implies the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) [ChMa]. In Chernov's paper [Ch2], such a bound is derived for dynamically Holder continuous observables of dispersing Billiards. Here we weaken the regularity assumption and subsequently show that the bound on multiple correlations follows directly from the bound on pair correlations. Thus, a strong bound on pair correlations alone implies the CLT, for a wider class of observables. The result is extended to Anosov diffeomorphisms in any dimension.
This work results from our attempts to solve Boltzmann-Sinai's hypothesis about the ergodicity of hard ball gases. A crucial element in the studies of the dynamics of hard balls is the analysis of special hypersurfaces in the phase space consisting of degenerate trajectories (which lack complete hyperbolicity). We prove that if a flow-invariant hypersurface $J$ in the phase space of a semi-dispersing billiard has a negative Lyapunov function, then the volume of the forward image of $J$ grows at least linearly in time. Our proof is independent of the solution of the Boltzmann-Sinai hypothesis, …
We prove exponential decay of correlations for the billiard flow associated with a two-dimensional finite horizon Lorentz Gas (i.e., the Sinai billiard flow with finite horizon). Along the way, we describe the spectrum of the generator of the corresponding semi-group L_t of transfer operators, i.e., the resonances of the Sinai billiard flow, on a suitable Banach space of anisotropic distributions. (Revised after referees' comments.)
We prove that the time of the first collision between two particles in a Sinai billiard table converges weakly to an exponential distribution when time is rescaled by the inverse of the radius of the particles. This results provides a first step in studying the energy evolution of hard ball systems in the rare interaction limit.
Understanding the statistical properties of the aperiodic planar Lorentz gas stands as a grand challenge in the theory of dynamical systems. Here we study a greatly simplified but related model, proposed by Arvind Ayyer and popularized by Joel Lebowitz, in which a scatterer configuration on the torus is randomly updated between collisions. Taking advantage of recent progress in the theory of time-dependent billiards on the one hand and in probability theory on the other, we prove a vector-valued almost sure invariance principle for the model. Notably, the configuration sequence can be weakly d…
The system of falling balls is an autonomous Hamiltonian system with a smooth invariant measure and non-zero Lyapunov exponents almost everywhere. For almost three decades new, the question of its ergodicity remains open. We contribute to the solution of the erogodicity conjecture for three falling balls with a specific mass ratio in the following two points: First, we prove the Chernov-Sinai ansatz. Second, we prove that there is an abundance of sufficiently expanding points. It is of special interest that for the aforementioned specific mass ratio, the configuration space can be unfolded to …
The system of falling balls is an autonomous Hamiltonian system with a smooth invariant measure and non-zero Lyapunov exponents almost everywhere. Since almost three decades, the question of ergodicity is still open. The subject of this work is to contribute to the solution of the ergodicity conjecture for three falling balls with a specific mass ratio. The latter is executed in the following three points: First, we prove the Chernov-Sinai ansatz. Second, we prove that there is an abundance of least expanding points and, third, we explain that the proper alignment condition can still be verifi…
We obtain sharp error rates in the local limit theorem for the Sinai billiard map (one and two dimensional) with infinite horizon. This result allows us to further obtain higher order terms and thus, sharp mixing rates in the speed of mixing of dynamically Hölder observables for the planar and tubular infinite horizon Lorentz gases in the map (discrete time) case. We also obtain an asymptotic estimate for the tail probability of the first return time to the initial cell. In the process, we study families of transfer operators for infinite horizon Sinai billiards perturbed with the free flight …
Since the seminal work of Sinai one studies chaotic properties of planar billiards tables. Among them is the study of decay of correlations for these tables. There are examples in the literature of tables with exponential and even polynomial decay. However, until now nothing is known about mixing properties for billiard tables with non-compact cusps. There is no consensual definition of mixing for systems with infinite invariant measure. In this paper we study geometric and ergodic properties of billiard tables with a non-compact cusp. The goal of this text is, using the definition of mixing p…
Uniform hyperbolicity is a strong chaotic property which holds, in particular, for Sinai billiards. In this paper, we consider the case of a nonflat billiard, that is, a Riemannian manifold with boundary. Each trajectory follows the geodesic flow in the interior of the billiard, and bounces when it meets the boundary. We give a sufficient condition for a nonflat billiard to be uniformly hyperbolic. As a particular case, we obtain a new criterion to show that a closed surface has an Anosov geodesic flow.
We propose a model of Sinai billiards with moving scatterers, in which the locations and shapes of the scatterers may change by small amounts between collisions. Our main result is the exponential loss of memory of initial data at uniform rates, and our proof consists of a coupling argument for non-stationary compositions of maps similar to classical billiard maps. This can be seen as a prototypical result on the statistical properties of time-dependent dynamical systems.
We formulate abstract conditions under which a suspension flow satisfies the local central limit theorem. We check the validity of these conditions for several systems including reward renewal processes, Axiom A flows, as well as the systems admitting Young tower, such as Sinai billiard with finite horizon, suspensions over Pomeau-Manneville maps, and geometric Lorenz attractors.
The goal of this article is to point out the importance of spatio-temporal processes in different questions of quantitative recurrence. We focus on applications to the study of the number of visits to a small set before the first visit to another set (question arising from a previous work by Kifer and Rapaport), the study of high records, the study of line processes, the study of the time spent by a flow in a small set. We illustrate these applications by results on billiards or geodesic flows. This paper contains in particular new result of convergence in distribution of the spatio temporal p…
We study the free path length and the geometric free path length in the model of the periodic two-dimensional Lorentz gas (Sinai billiard). We give a complete and rigorous proof for the existence of their distributions in the small-scatterer limit and explicitly compute them. As a corollary one gets a complete proof for the existence of the constant term $c=2-3\ln 2+\frac{27ζ(3)}{2π^2}$ in the asymptotic formula $h(T)=-2\ln \eps+c+o(1)$ of the KS entropy of the billiard map in this model, as conjectured by P. Dahlqvist.
We consider the billiard flow of elastically colliding hard balls on the flat $ν$-torus ($ν\ge 2$), and prove that no singularity manifold can even locally coincide with a manifold describing future non-hyperbolicity of the trajectories. As a corollary, we obtain the ergodicity (actually the Bernoulli mixing property) of all such systems, i.e. the verification of the Boltzmann-Sinai Ergodic Hypothesis.
