Compound Poisson Law for Hitting Times to Periodic Orbits in Two-Dimensional Hyperbolic Systems

We show that a compound Poisson distribution holds for scaled exceedances of observables \(\phi \) uniquely maximized at a periodic point \(\zeta \) in a variety of two-dimensional hyperbolic dynamical systems with singularities \((M,T,\mu )\), including the billiard maps of Sinai dispersing billiards in both the finite and infinite horizon case. The observable we consider is of form \(\phi (z)=-\ln d(z,\zeta )\) where d is a metric defined in terms of the stable and unstable foliation. The compound Poisson process we obtain is a Pólya-Aeppli distibution of index \(\theta \). We calculate \(\theta \) in terms of the derivative of the map T. Furthermore if we define \(M_n=\max \{\phi ,\ldots ,\phi \circ T^n\}\) and \(u_n (\tau )\) by \(\lim _{n\rightarrow \infty } n\mu (\phi >u_n (\tau ) )=\tau \) the maximal process satisfies an extreme value law of form \(\mu (M_n \le u_n)=e^{-\theta \tau }\). These results generalize to a broader class of functions maximized at \(\zeta \), though the formulas regarding the parameters in the distribution need to be modified.