Limiting stochastic processes of shift-periodic dynamical systems

Abstract

A shift-periodic map is a one-dimensional map from the real line to itself which is periodic up to a linear translation and allowed to have singularities. It is shown that iterative sequences $x_{n+1}=F(x_n)$ generated by such maps display rich dynamical behaviour. The integer parts $\lfloor x_n \rfloor$ give a discrete-time random walk for a suitable initial distribution of $x_0$ and converge in certain limits to Brownian motion or more general L\'evy processes. Furthermore, for certain shift-periodic maps with small holes on $[0,1]$, convergence of trajectories to a continuous-time random walk is shown in a limit.