Thermodynamic formalism for random non-uniformly expanding maps (Q2035920)

This paper develops a thermodynamic formalism for non-uniformly expanding random dynamical systems. The original theory of thermodynamic formalism by Sinai, Ruelle and Bowen was focused on uniformly hyperbolic diffeomorphisms. Since then the concept has been extended to random dynamical systems, and has often been used to describe physical models evolving in time. In the authors' framework these systems act on smooth compact manifolds of dimension one and greater. The authors consider a broad class: they require no Markov structure, all the maps generating the random dynamical system may fail to be uniformly expanding, and the locally defined number of pre-images may be unbounded. The authors need a set of combinatorial assumptions, thus requiring in essence that the average weight of the areas with possible contraction does not exceed that of regions with expanding behavior. In very general terms they prove that any random transformation that has a combinatorial expansion on average and any smooth potential at high temperature admits a unique quenched equilibrium state having a weak Gibbs property and exponential decay of correlations. The authors include some applications of their results to show that their assumptions are fairly mild. These include random Manneville-Pomeau maps, random perturbations of non-uniformly expanding maps, and random maps that expand weakly on average.