A family of natural equilibrium measures for Sinai billiard flows

Ergodicity, mixing, rates of mixing (37A25) Functional analytic techniques in dynamical systems; zeta functions, (Ruelle-Frobenius) transfer operators, etc. (37C30) Thermodynamic formalism, variational principles, equilibrium states for dynamical systems (37D35) Sobolev spaces and other spaces of ``smooth functions, embedding theorems, trace theorems (46E35) Linear operators on function spaces (general) (47B38) Dynamical systems with singularities (billiards, etc.) (37C83)

Abstract: The Sinai billiard flow on the two-torus, i.e., the periodic Lorentz gas, is a continuous flow, but it is not everywhere differentiable. Assuming finite horizon, we relate the equilibrium states of the flow with those of the Sinai billiard map

T

-- which is a discontinuous map. We propose a definition for the topological pressure

P_{*} (T, g)

associated to a potential

g

. We prove that for any piecewise H"older potential

g

satisfying a mild assumption,

P_{*} (T, g)

is equal to the definitions of Bowen using spanning or separating sets. We give sufficient conditions under which a potential gives rise to equilibrium states for the Sinai billiard map. We prove that in this case the equilibrium state

m u_{g}

is unique, Bernoulli, adapted and gives positive measure to all nonempty open sets. For this, we make use of a well chosen transfer operator acting on anisotropic Banach spaces, and construct the measure by pairing its maximal eigenvectors. Last, we prove that the flow invariant probability measure

, obtained by taking the product of

m u_{g}

with the Lebesgue measure along orbits, is Bernoulli and flow adapted. We give examples of billiard tables for which there exists an open set of potentials satisfying those sufficient conditions.

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