A pair correlation bound implies the Central Limit Theorem for Sinai Billiards

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Mikko Stenlund, Courant Institute, NYU
Fine Hall 401

It is an open problem in the study of dynamical systems whether fast decay of correlations alone is sufficient for the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) to hold. On the one hand, there are no examples of dynamical systems for which correlations decay quickly but the CLT fails. On the other, existing CLT proofs rely on statistical properties much stronger than correlation decay. In the talk I will discuss a prime class of physically relevant systems, called Sinai Billiards, and show that a single bound on correlations indeed implies the CLT directly. As a byproduct, the CLT is obtained for observables possessing remarkably little regularity.