Last time, we reduced the proof of the exponential mixing property for expanding semiflows to the following Dolgopyat-like estimate:
Proposition 1 Let
be an uniformly expanding Markov map on
and let
be a good roof function with exponential tails.Then, there exist
,
,
and
such that the iterates
of the weighted transfer operator
satisfy
for all
and
with
,
.
Remark 1 We use the same terminology from the previous post of this series.
Roughly speaking, the basic idea behind the exponential contraction property in Proposition 1 is that “oscillations produce cancellations”. In particular, the analysis of the “size” of is divided into two regimes:
- (A) If
exhibits a high oscillation at scale
(in the sense that
), then we will have a “cancelation” (significant reduction of the size of
) thanks to classical methods (Lasota-Yorke inequality);
- (B) If the oscillation of
at scale
is not high, then we will have a “cancelation” thanks to Dolgopyat’s mechanism, i.e., a combination of high oscillations of Birkhoff sums
of the roof function
(coming from the fact that
is not a
-coboundary) and the big phases
,
, of the terms
in the formula defining
.
In the remainder of this post, we will formalize this outline of proof of Proposition 1. More precisely, the next section contains a discussion of Lasota-Yorke inequality and the regime (A), and the last section is devoted to Dolgopyat’s cancelation mechanism and the regime (B).
1. Lasota-Yorke inequality and regime (A)
Before attacking Proposition 1, let us warm up with a digression on the spectral properties of the weighted transfer operators .
The usual transfer operator acts on the space of
functions. This action has a simple isolated eigenvalue at
. The eigenfunction
associated to the eigenvalue
and normalized so that
is the density
of the unique absolutely continuous invariant probability measure of
. Furthermore, the essential spectral radius of
is
and
has no eigenvalues
of modulus
except for
. (See Aaronson’s book for more explanations.)
For close to
, the operator
is a small perturbation of
. In particular,
has an eigenfunction
associated to its unique eigenvalue
close to
such that
and
converges to
in the
-topology as
.
From now on, let us fix such that
is well-defined and bounded away from zero for
. (Here,
is the constant appearing in the exponential tails condition
for the roof function
.)
From the technical point of view, it is convenient to “uniformize” this spectral picture by normalizing the operators (for
with
) as follows:
The normalized weighted transfer operator satisfy
and
. In other words, if we replace
by
, we normalize both the eigenvalue
and the eigenfunction
to
. Moreover, the proof of Proposition 1 can reduced to the analogous statement for the normalized operators:
Proposition 2 Suppose that there exist
,
,
,
and
such that
for all
and
with
and
. Then, the conclusion of Proposition 1 is valid.
The proof of this proposition is based on Lasota-Yorke inequality (cf. Lemmas 7.8 and 7.9 of AGY paper):
Lemma 3 There exists a constant
such that, for all
and
with
,
, we have
for all
;
- if
, then
;
- if
, then
,
where
is the expansion constant of
.
Before proving this lemma, let us use it to show Proposition 2. Recall that the assumption of this proposition is that
for some fixed ,
, and for all
and
with
,
, and our task is to prove the analogous statement in Proposition 1 for
.
The idea is very simple: from the spectral discussion above, it is not hard to see that we introduce a factor of the order of when replacing
by
; since
is close to
, this factor does not significantly affect definite contraction on the size of
provided by the hypothesis of Proposition 2. Let us now turn into the details.
Given , we write
with
. Since
and
is uniformly
close to
, the previous estimate for the normalized operator
gives that
for all with
,
. By the last item of Lemma 3, it follows that
Because is close to
for
small, we can choose
such that
we deduce from the previous estimate that
for all and
with
,
. This completes the proof of Proposition 2 modulo Lemma 3.
1.1. Proof of Lasota-Yorke inequality
Let us now prove Lemma 3. The first item follows from a computation similar to the proof of Lemma 8 of the previous post, and its half-page proof is given in Lemma 7.8 of AGY paper.
For the sake of convenience, we provide just a sketch of proof. We write
where is the set of inverse branches of
,
and
(with
). By taking the derivative
, we obtain five terms
,
,
,
,
depending by differentiating
,
,
,
or
.
The terms and
are easy to deal with: the uniform
bounds on
and
, and the contraction of inverse branches of
imply that
and
. Thus,
.
Similarly, the distortion bound (Renyi condition) on (see the previous post) implies that
, so that
.
Since and
(because
is a good roof function and the inverse branches of
contract exponentially), we see that
and, a fortiori,
.
Finally, the exponential contraction of inverse branches of says that
, so that
. This proves the first item of Lemma 3.
The second item is an immediate consequence of the estimate and the first item just proved. Indeed, if
, then
Closing the proof of Lemma 3, we observe that the third item is a direct corollary of the second item.
1.2. First part of Proposition 1: study of regime (A)
By Proposition 2, one can establish Proposition 1 by showing a contraction property for the normalized weighted transfer operators .
As we already mentioned, the first step in this direction is the treatment of the regime (A) of functions displaying high oscillations via Lasota-Yorke inequality:
Lemma 4 There exists
such that any
has the following property.Let
with
and
and suppose that
exhibits a high oscillation at scale
in the sense that
(where
is the constant from Lemma 3). Then,
Proof: The facts that is normalized and
has high oscillations imply that
Furthermore, the Lasota-Yorke inequality in the first item of Lemma 3 says that
Since and
, we get that
for and
sufficiently large (so that
).
Of course, we can iterate this lemma to establish the contraction property in Proposition 2 while the high oscillation property is not destroyed by :
Corollary 5 Fix
where
is the integer provided by Lemma 4. Suppose that
is a
function on
and
is an integer such that the high oscillation property is not destroyed by the first
iterates of
, i.e.,
for all
and for some
with
,
. Then,
Proof: By the third item of Lemma 3, we have that
By iterating Lemma 4, it follows that
This proves the corollary.
Remark 2 The proof of the corollary shows that a strong (pointwise/
) form of cancellation
occurs in the high oscillation case (regime (A)). As we are going to see in the next section, one has a much weaker (
) form of cancellation in the low oscillation case (regime (B)).
2. Dolgopyat’s mechanism and regime (B)
After our success in dealing with the regime (A) (cf. Corollary 5), let us analyze the regime (B) of functions
whose oscillation is not high.
2.1. UNI condition
As we told in the introduction, the cancellation mechanism in regime (B) originates from the oscillations of the Birkhoff sums of the roof function
. Here, by “oscillations of Birkhoff sums” we mean the following:
Proposition 6 Let
be an uniformly expanding Markov map. Let
be a
function such that
(where
is the set of inverse branches of
.)Then, the following conditions are equivalent:
is not a
coboundary: it is not possible to write
with
which is constant on each
and
.
- Uniform non-integrability (UNI) condition (“oscillation of Birkhoff sums”): there exists a constant
such that
for some
arbitrarily large and some inverse branches
of
.
This proposition is (contained in) Proposition 7.4 of AGY paper and we refer to it for the one page proof of this result.
Remark 3 The main point of this proposition is that a qualitative property (“not a
coboundary”) in our definition of good roof function in the previous post turns out to be equivalent to a quantitative property (“definite oscillation of Birkhoff sums”). The nomenclature “uniform non-integrability” (UNI) comes from the fact that this is a (uniform) quantitative property issued from the fact that the suspension flow
associated to
and
is not integrable (conjugated to a suspension flow with piecewise constant roof function) when
is not a
coboundary.
2.2. Dolgopyat’s cancellation mechanism
Let us now use UNI condition to produce non-trivial cancellations in some regions of the phase space for
functions with “low oscillations”. In other terms, we want to study
,
, for
such that
.
For technical reasons, we will keep track of and an appropriate
-bound
for
:
Definition 7 Given
, we say that
if
is
,
is a
function providing an adequate
bound for
in the sense that
, and
for all
.
Remark 4
is a cone and we are going to show in Lemma 10 that
sends
“strictly inside itself” in a certain sense.
Moreover, we need to anticipate the fact in Remark 3 that the cancellations in regime (B) occur only at certain spots of the phase space. In particular, the following “localization tool” (cf. Lemma 7.12 in AGY paper) will be helpful in the subsequent cancellation discussion.
Lemma 8 There exists an integer
such that any
has the following property. Let
with
,
, let
, and let
with
,
. Suppose that, for all
, we have
Then,
.
This lemma is a consequence of the Lasota-Yorke inequality in Lemma 3 and its half-page proof can be found after the statement of Lemma 7.12 in AGY paper.
Remark 5 We call this lemma a “localization tool” for the following reason. We think of
as a
bump function supported on disjoint intervals of size
. Next, we use
to “localize” an appropriate
bound
in a pair
to the support of
by considering
. In this setting, the lemma says that if the iterate
of this localization gives a
bound to
, then
is actually an appropriate
bound for
(i.e.,
).
From now on, we use UNI condition (cf. Proposition 6) to fix and inverse branches
such that
where ,
and
are the constants in Lemmas 3 and 8. (This is possible because
.)
In this language, Dolgopyat’s cancellation mechanism can be stated as:
Lemma 9 There exist a small constant
and a large constant
with the following property. Let
with
,
, and
.Then, for every interval
, we can find a point
such that one of the following possibilities holds:
- Cancellation of type
: for all
, we have
- Cancellation of type
: for all
, we have
In other words, this lemma says that, for each interval of of size of order
, we can find a subinterval
of size of the same order where the two terms of
associated to the inverse branches and
fixed above exhibits a significant cancellation w.r.t. the trivial bound (i.e., one gets a factor of
instead of
).
This lemma is exactly Lemma 7.13 in AGY paper and we provide a sketch of its proof in the sequel.
Proof: Let , resp.
be a small, resp. large constant. Consider
and
. Our task is to find
with
so that the conclusion of the lemma is valid.
The argument is divided into two cases. In the first (easy) case, we assume that the appropriate bound
for
is not “tight”, i.e., there exists
such that
or
. In this situation, we want to take advantage of the non-tightness (and the fact that
does not have high oscillations [as
]) to get some cancellation in an interval of size
centered at
.
For this sake, up to exchanging the roles of and
, we can assume that
. Since
, we know that
. Thus,
because
is a contraction. By Gronwall’s inequality, it follows that
. Therefore,
for all . By integrating this estimate, we see that
for all . Since
(by “non-tightness” assumption), we obtain from the estimates above that, if
is small enough, then
for all . This proves the lemma in this “non-tight” case.
In the second case, we assume that the bound
for
is “tight”, i.e.,
and
for all
. In this context, we want to find
such that the complex numbers
have opposite phases.
For this sake, we put for
and we denote by
the difference of the phases (arguments) of the complex numbers
Using UNI condition (2), the fact that does not have high oscillations (i.e.,
) and the “tightness” of the
bound
for
, it is possible to prove with a short calculation that
where . (See page 192 of AGY paper.)
It follows that if is sufficiently large (e.g.,
), then there exists
such that
and
have opposite phases.
We set . By exchanging the roles of
and
if necessary, we can assume that
. By exploiting the fact that
does not have high oscillations and the tightness of the
bound
for
(via Gronwall inequality), it is possible to show (through another short calculation, cf. page 193 in AGY paper) that if
is sufficiently small, then for all
one has
and
where and
denote the phases of the complex numbers
and
. In other terms, for any
in the interval
,
- the size of
does not drop too much in comparison with the size of
: except for a factor
, one still has the same comparison
from the case
;
and
have almost opposite phases.
On the other hand, an elementary trigonometry lemma (cf. Lemma 7.14 in AGY paper) says that two complex numbers and
such that
and
verify the “cancellation estimate”
By applying this lemma to and
for
, we deduce that if
, then
that is, one has a cancellation of type .
This completes the sketch of proof of Lemma 9.
2.3. Second part of Proposition 1: study of regime (B)
By Proposition 2 and Corollary 5, one can establish Proposition 1 by proving a -contraction property in regime (B) for the normalized weighted transfer operators.
Evidently, the key tool to get this -contraction property is Dolgopyat’s cancellation lemma 9 because it says that, given any interval
of size
, a non-trivial amount of cancellation for
must happen inside a subinterval
of comparable size
. In particular, for the regime (B), even though we do not get cancellation everywhere in phase space, we still have cancellation in large chunks of the phase space. Thus, it is reasonable to expect a contraction property for
in the
norm (but not for the
norm) in the regime (B).
Let us now try to formalize this heuristic argument. Fix such that
where
and
are the constants in Lemma 9.
Lemma 10 There exists
and
with the following property. Let
with
,
, and let
. Then, there exists
such that
and
In other words, this lemma says that for any in regime (B) (i.e.,
), we can find an appropriate
bound
for
whose
-norm got contracted by a definite factor
in comparison with the
-norm of an appropriate
-bound
for
.
This lemma is exactly Lemma 7.15 in AGY paper. For the sake of convenience, let us now sketch its proof.
Proof: We take a maximal set of points such that the intervals
are pairwise disjoint and compactly contained in
. Note that the intervals
cover
.
By Dolgopyat’s cancellation lemma 9, we know that each contains a subinterval
such that a cancellation of type
or
occurs for the pair
in regime (B). We say that
has type
, resp. type
depending on the type of cancellation occurring in
.
We want to use our knowledge of the cancellation on each to modify the trivial
bound
for
: roughly speaking, we want to insert a factor
in front of the terms of
associated to
or
whenever
. At this point, the localization tool in Lemma 8 will prove itself useful.
From the technical point of view, we implement the idea from the previous paragraph as follows. We consider a bump function localized on each
: we impose
on
,
outside
and
(for some universal constant
). Next, we construct
on
by putting
Note that for some constant
depending only on the fixed objects
,
and
. In particular,
is independent of
and the pair
. The function
was built up so that
is a
function taking values in
such that
and
has a definite contraction factor in front of the term associated to
or
whenever
for some
.
In summary, we manipulated some bump functions associated to to get a function
such that:
,
,
for
and
given by the type of
,
for
or
and
not of the type of
.
From the properties in the last two items, we see that the statement of Dolgopyat’s cancellation lemma 9 implies that
that is, is a
bound for
. By combining this fact with the property in the first item and the localization tool in Lemma 8, we have that
is actually an appropriate
bound for
, i.e.,
Therefore, our task is reduced to prove that for some constant
(independent of
,
and
). In this direction, a short (half-page) calculation (cf. page 193 in AGY paper) exploiting the cancellation mechanism for any
shows that
and
Note that the estimate (3) goes in the good direction: it implies that
by the definition of the normalized transfer operator (and the fact that
), and we know that
for
sufficiently small.
On the other hand, the estimate (4) by itself is not sufficient to control in the desired way.
Fortunately, we know that covers “most” of the phase space and
does not oscillate too much: more precisely, we have that
is formed of intervals
of size
contained in some intervals
covering the whole phase space
(as it was said in the beginning of the proof) and
.
By combining this facts with Gronwall’s inequality, it is possible to prove (after a short calculation, cf. pages 195 and 196 of AGY paper) that there exists a constant such that
Because the intervals are pairwise disjoint, the intervals
cover
, the density
is bounded away from
and
, and
is uniformly bounded (since the size of both
and
is
), the estimate above implies that there exists a constant
such that
This new information (coming from the low oscillations of and the fact that
covers almost all of
) permits to get the desired
-contraction for
. Indeed, this is a consequence of the following simple computation (resembling to “Peter-Paul inequality”). Denote by
. By (3) and (4), we have
for any parameter . By applying (5) to the right-hand side of the previous inequality, we deduce that
for each . By taking
so that
, we see that the estimate above implies that
where .
Therefore, if we take small enough so that
, then
This completes the proof of the lemma.
Evidently, the main point of Lemma 10 is that one can iterate it to obtain the contraction property in Proposition 2 in regime (B):
Corollary 11 Consider the integer
fixed above. Let
,
and
be the constants provided by Lemma 10, and denote by
with
,
.Let
and
. Suppose that
is the first time such that
does not exhibit high oscillation at scale
, i.e.,
Then,
Proof: We set . By definition,
where
is the constant function
. By successively applying Lemma 10, we obtain a sequence of pairs
such that
By setting and by recalling that
for all
, we conclude from the previous estimate that
This proves the corollary.
At this point, the proof of Proposition 1 is complete. Indeed, this is so because the hypothesis of Proposition 2 is always satisfied in both regimes (A) (by Corollary 5) and (B) (by Corollary 11).
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