We determine limit distributions for return- and hitting-time functions of certain asymptotically rare events for conservative ergodic infinite measure preserving transformations with regularly varying asymptotic type. Our abstract result applies, in particular, to shrinking cylinders around typical points of null-recurrent renewal shifts and infinite measure preserving interval maps with neutral fixed points.

We consider some non-uniformly hyperbolic invertible dynamical systems which are modeled by a Gibbs–Markov–Young tower. We assume a polynomial tail for the inducing time and a polynomial control of hyperbolicity, as introduced by Alves, Pinheiro and Azevedo. These systems admit a physical measure with polynomial rate of mixing. In this paper we prove that the distribution of the number of visits to a ball $B(x,r)$ converges to a Poisson distribution as the radius $r\rightarrow 0$ and after suitable normalization.

We consider toral extensions of hyperbolic dynamical systems. We prove that its quantitative recurrence (also with respect to given observables) and hitting time scale behavior depend on the arithmetical properties of the extension. By this we show that those systems have a polynomial decay of correlations with respect to $C^{r}$ observables, and give estimations for its exponent, which depend on $r$ and on the arithmetical properties of the system. We also show examples of systems of this kind having no shrinking target property, and having a trivial limit distribution of return time statistics.

We present an original approach which allows us to investigate the statistical properties of a non-uniformly hyperbolic map on the interval. Based on a stochastic approximation of the deterministic map, this method essentially gives the optimal polynomial bound for the decay of correlations, the degree depending on the order of the tangency at the neutral fixed point.

We show that for a large class of piecewise monotonic transformations on a totally ordered, compact set one can construct conformal measures and obtain the exponential mixing rate for the associated equilibrium state. The method is based on the study of the Perron–Frobenius operator. The conformal measure, the density of the invariant measure and the rate of mixing are deduced by using an appropriate Hilbert metric, without any compactness arguments, even in the case of a countable to one transformation.