Almost all cocycles over any hyperbolic system have nonvanishing Lyapunov exponents (Q2389097)

The authors show that for any \(s>0\) the majority of \(C^s\) linear cocycles over any hyperbolic (uniformly or not) ergodic transformation exhibit some nonzero Lyapunov exponent: this is true for an open dense subset of cocycles and, actually, vanishing Lyapunov exponents correspond to codimension-\(\infty\). This open dense subset is described in terms of a geometric condition involving the behavior of the cocycle over certain heteroclinic orbits of the transformation. An extension of the result is also obtained for the nonergodic case. Some open problems resulting from the discussion are posed.