Random products of standard maps (Q2191161)

The author notes that nonuniform hyperbolicity is still not well understood, and suggests that a primary reason for this is that there are still very few examples of truly nonuniformly hyperbolic systems. One of his goals in this paper is to identify new examples of partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms, particularly ones with interestingly rich high-dimensional center dynamics. In pursuit of this goal the author starts by refining and exploring ideas and techniques introduced in a previous paper by the author and his coauthor \textit{P. Berger} [Commun. Math. Phys. 329, No. 1, 239--262 (2014; Zbl 1350.37032)]. The arguments presented there were focused on a specific case, and the aim was to study the behavior of the center Lyapunov exponents of a specific standard family. In this paper the author aims to develop more generally applicable methods without the low dimensionality restrictions of the previous work. To support this he returns to and refines the notions of admissible curves and adapted fields from the prior paper. The idea is to develop a general geometric method to prove the existence of positive Lyapunov exponents for a class of skew product maps. This method is then used to prove nonuniform hyperbolicity for some conservative partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms whose center dynamics incorporates coupled random products of standard maps. A reader seeking to understand the methods and results of this paper would be advised to read the previously cited paper first (as well as some of its references) because the current paper touches only very lightly on some of the relevant background material.