Growth of heights in piecewise-affine planar maps

Abstract

We consider the growth of heights of the points of the orbits of (piecewise) affine maps of the plane, with rational parameters. We analyse the asymptotic growth rate of both global and local ($p$-adic) heights, for the primes $p$ that divide the parameters. We show that almost all the points in a domain of linearity (such as an elliptic island in an area-preserving map) have the same exponential growth rate. We also show that the convergence of the $p$-adic height may be non-uniform, with arbitrarily large fluctuations occurring arbitrarily close to any point. We explore numerically the behaviour of heights in the chaotic regions, in both area-preserving and dissipative systems.