Young towers for product systems (Q256158)

Young towers have been shown to imply a variety of statistical properties. A product of two Young towers is not necessarily a Young tower. The main result of this paper states that the product of Young towers nevertheless admits a Young tower structure. The author also obtain estimates for the decay of the return times. In Section 2, the authors give a precise definition of Young towers, also called Gibbs-Markov-Young towers, in the non-invertible case. They consider a dynamical system \((M,f)\) where \(M\) is a Riemannian manifold and \(f\) is a local diffeomorphism of class \(C^{1+\epsilon }, \epsilon \in (0,1)\), outside of some singular set. The Riemannian volume on \(M\) is referred to as a Lebesgue measure. The definition of tower structure is technical but the conditions in the definition imply that \(f\) admits an invariant measure \(\mu \) which is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure, moreover, this measure is finite, and the dynamical system is mixing. Sections 3--6 are devoted to the proof of the main theorem (Theorem 1.1) in the non-invertible case. The existence of the Young tower structure as well as proving the decay estimates involve both analytical and combinatorial arguments. The authors establish exponential decay, stretched exponential decay and polynomial decay estimates for the return time. In Section 7 both the definition of Young towers and the proof of the main theorem is extended to the invertible case. The paper also contains three appendix sections in which various estimates have been collected.