Quantitative recurrence in two-dimensional extended processes

Abstract

Under some mild condition, a random walk in the plane is recurrent. In particular each trajectory is dense, and a natural question is how much time one needs to approach a given small neighborhood of the origin. We address this question in the case of some extended dynamical systems similar to planar random walks, including $\ZZ^2$-extension of hyperbolic dynamics. We define a pointwise recurrence rate and relate it to the dimension of the process, and establish a convergence in distribution of the rescaled return times near the origin.