Multiple mixing for a class of conservative surface flows

Abstract

Arnol'd and Kochergin mixing conservative flows on surfaces stand as the main and almost only natural class of mixing transformations for which higher order mixing has not been established, nor disproved. Under suitable arithmetic conditions on their unique rotation vector, of full Lebesgue measure in the first case and of full Hausdorff dimension in the second, we show that these flows are mixing of any order. For this, we show that they display a generalization of the so called Ratner property on slow divergence of nearby orbits, that implies strong restrictions on their joinings, that in turn yield higher order mixing. This is the first case in which the Ratner property is used to prove multiple mixing outside its original context of horocycle flows and we expect our approach will have further applications.