Exponential decay of correlations for surface semiflows with an expanding direction (Q2654730)

The main purpose of this article is to give a sufficient condition of the exponential decay of correlations for suspension semiflows over piecewise expanding maps without finite or countable Markov partitions. Here the suspension semiflow is a special class of continuous-time dynamical systems which is defined as follows. Let \(T:X\to X\) be a measurable map and \(\mu\) be a \(T\)-invariant measure. Let \(r:X\to \mathbb{R}_+\) be a positive function with \(\inf r >0\) and assume \(\int r d\mu <\infty\). Then, it is defined a new space \(X^r\) as \(\{(x,s)\in X\times \mathbb{R}_+ |0\leq s \leq r(x)\}/\thicksim\), where the equivalence relation \(\thicksim\) is generated by \((x,r(x))\thicksim (T(x),0)\), and on the space \(X^r\) the semiflow \(F_t\) is defined as \(F_t(x,s)=(x,s+t)/\thicksim\). Further it is naturally defined an \(F_t\) -invariant probability measure \(\mu^r\) as \(\mu \times \text{Leb}/\int r d\mu\), where Leb is the Lebegue measure on \(\mathbb{R}\). This measure \(\mu^r\) is frequently used for suspension semiflows because it has a good relation to ergodic properties of \((T,\mu)\). For example, if \((T,\mu)\) is ergodic, then so is \((F_t, \mu^r)\). The study of suspension semiflows is important since we can understand many continuous-time dynamical systems as suspension semiflows of Poincaré maps of dynamical systems.