Hitting and escaping statistics: mixing, targets and holes (Q1705490)

The authors study the relationship between hitting times to shrinking targets and hitting times to a fixed target (open systems or systems with holes) for dynamical systems with ergodic probability measures. The systems considered in this paper are classified in the following classes: (i) interval maps with spectral gap assumptions on the transfer operators; (ii) systems with well-chosen first return maps, where the (exponential or subexponential) tails of the first-return time affect the statistical properties. These results can be applied to many examples, like generalized Farey maps and systems with Young towers. Let \(f\) be a measure-preserving map on \(X\) with an ergodic measure \(\mu\), \((U_r)_R\) be a sequence of subsets with \(U_r\) shrinking to a given point \(z\) as \(r\to0\), \(\tau_r\) be the first hitting time to \(U_r\) \[ \tau_r(x):=\inf\{n\geq1:\;f^n(x)\in U_r\}. \] The analysis of the following limit (if exists) plays an important role: \[ L_{\alpha,s}(z)=\lim_{r\to 0}\frac{-1}{s\mu(U_r)^{1-\alpha}}\log\mu(\tau_r>s\mu(U_r)^{-\alpha}), \] where \(\alpha\) and \(s\) are positive parameters, and \(z\in X\).