Exponential decay of correlations for finite horizon Sinai billiard flows (Q1692196)

This paper completes the study of decay of correlations of planar dispersing billiard systems, initiated by Y.G. Sinai's seminal work in which he extended the ideas of Hopf and Anosov to the case of piecewise smooth dynamical systems. Specifically, the authors exploit the fact that the billiard flow preserves a contact form and establish exponential decay of correlations for the billiard flow associated with a finite horizon Lorentz gas. As a byproduct, they obtain information on the resonances of the billiard flow. Although they obtain a spectral gap for the spectrum of the generator on an anisotropic Banach space, their method does not show that the time-one transfer operator has a spectral gap on that Banach space.