Gibbs measures for contact Anosov flows are all exponentially mixing

Abstract

In this work we study strong spectral properties of Ruelle transfer operators related to Gibbs measures for contact Anosov flows. As a consequence we establish exponential decay of correlations for Hölder observables with respect to any Gibbs measure. The approach invented in 1997 by Dolgopyat, and further developed in our papers in 2011 and 2023, is substantially enhanced here, allowing to deal with the general case of arbitrary contact Anosov flows and arbitrary Gibbs measures. The results obtained here naturally apply to geodesic flows on compact Riemannian manifolds. As is now well-known, the strong spectral estimates for Ruelle operators and a well-established technique by Dolgopyat lead to exponential decay of correlations for Hölder continuous potentials. Other immediate consequences are: (a) existence of a non-zero analytic continuation of the Ruelle zeta function with a pole at the entropy in a vertical strip containing the entropy in its interior; (b) a Prime Orbit Theorem with an exponentially small error.