Infinite-volume mixing for dynamical systems preserving an infinite measure

Abstract

In the scope of the statistical description of dynamical systems, one of the defining features of chaos is the tendency of a system to lose memory of its initial conditions (more precisely, of the distribution of its initial conditions). For a dynamical system preserving a probability measure, this property is named `mixing' and is equivalent to the decay of correlations for observables in phase space. For the class of dynamical systems preserving infinite measures, this probabilistic connection is lost and no completely satisfactory definition has yet been found which expresses the idea of losing track of the initial state of a system due to its chaotic dynamics. This is actually on open problem in the field of infinite ergodic theory. Virtually all the definitions that have been attempted so far use "local observables", that is, functions that essentially only "see" finite portions of the phase space. In this note we introduce the concept of "global observable", a function that gauges a certain quantity throughout the phase space. This concept is based on the notion of infinite-volume average, which plays the role of the expected value of a global observable. Endowed with these notions, whose rigorous definition is to be specified on a case-by-case basis, we give a number of definitions of infinite mixing. These fall in two categories: global-global mixing, which expresses the "decorrelation" of two global observables, and global-local mixing, where a global and a local observable are considered instead. These definitions are tested on two types of infinite-measure-preserving dynamical systems, the random walks and the Farey map.