Anomalous time-scaling of extreme events in infinite systems and Birkhoff sums of infinite observables (Q1995569)

This paper establishes quantitative results for the statistical behaviour of two kinds of infinite systems. The first few pages introduce all the necessary notation and terminology to understand the paper: non-integrable observables; known relations between Birkhoff sums of infinite observables, hitting times and Borel-Cantelli properties; growth of Birkhoff sums and extremes; the behaviour of the hitting time to small targets, and logarithm laws, and dynamical Borel-Cantelli laws for infinite measure preserving systems. The main results are stated in Section 2 by Theorem 2.4 and 2.5 (the growth of Birkhoff sums for rapidly mixing systems), Theorem 2.9 (limit laws for maxima and hitting times) and Theorem 2.11 (dynamical Borel-Cantelli Lemma results for systems preserving a \(\sigma\)-finite infinite measure). The proof of aformentioned theorems are provided in Sections 3 and 5. Then, considering several independent topics which relate to the theory, a result on the almost sure growth rates of extremes and hitting times for infinite systems (see Section 2.5) is presented. Furthermore, the application of this theory to an intermittent map case is studied in Section 2.6, which includes a study of dynamical run-length problems in Section 2.6.3. After the proofs in Section 3 and 5 of the main theorems, a final result concerning the oscillation of the Birkhoff sums is described in certain situations and the Borel-Cantelli results for general Markov extensions, such as Young towers (Section 9) is considered.