Infinite measure mixing for some mechanical systems (Q2099100)

Many dynamical systems of interest in physics or mechanics come naturally equipped with an infinite invariant measure. This means that the notion of mixing, central to an understanding of their stochastic properties, needs to be formulated differently because not even recurrence is guaranteed. Here an abstract framework is developed for mixing in the setting of approximately periodic maps preserving an infinite measure and the analogous results for flows. Of particular interest are results related to global mixing, in which the calculation of the expected value of an extended observable over a long time limit is made possible by the stochastic properties of the dynamics. The second part of the paper is concerned with applying these results to a wide range of explicit examples. In some cases highly non-trivial arguments are needed to verify that a given example of a non-uniformly hyperbolic mechanical system of interest does indeed satisfy the hypotheses needed for some of the abstract results. The paper ends with a summary and guide to what has been proved and some indications of how these ideas may be further extended and applied.