In this paper, we study the ergodicity of the geodesic flows on surfaces with no focal points. Let M be a smooth connected and closed surface equipped with a $C^{\infty }$ Riemannian metric g, whose genus $\mathfrak {g} \geq 2$. Suppose that $(M,g)$ has no focal points. We prove that the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle of M is ergodic with respect to the Liouville measure, under the assumption that the set of points on M with negative curvature has at most finitely many connected components.

We prove that uniform hyperbolicity is invariant under topological conjugacy for dissipative polynomial automorphisms of $\mathbb {C}^2$ . Along the way we also show that a sufficient condition for hyperbolicity is that local stable and unstable manifolds of saddle points have uniform geometry.

The papers [O. M. Sarig. Symbolic dynamics for surface diffeomorphisms with positive entropy. J. Amer. Math. Soc.26(2) (2013), 341–426] and [S. Ben Ovadia. Symbolic dynamics for non-uniformly hyperbolic diffeomorphisms of compact smooth manifolds. J. Mod. Dyn.13 (2018), 43–113] constructed symbolic dynamics for the restriction of $C^r$ diffeomorphisms to a set $M'$ with full measure for all sufficiently hyperbolic ergodic invariant probability measures, but the set $M'$ was not identified there. We improve the construction in a way that enables $M'$ to be identified explicitly. One application is the coding of infinite conservative measures on the homoclinic classes of Rodriguez-Hertz et al. [Uniqueness of SRB measures for transitive diffeomorphisms on surfaces. Comm. Math. Phys.306(1) (2011), 35–49].

The Chirikov standard map is a prototypical example of a one-parameter family of volume-preserving maps for which one anticipates chaotic behavior on a non-negligible (positive-volume) subset of phase space for a large set of parameters. Rigorous analysis is notoriously difficult and it remains an open question whether this chaotic region, the stochastic sea, has positive Lebesgue measure for any parameter value. Here we study a problem of intermediate difficulty: compositions of standard maps with increasing coefficient. When the coefficients increase to infinity at a sufficiently fast polynomial rate, we obtain a strong law, a central limit theorem, and quantitative mixing estimates for Holder observables. The methods used are not specific to the standard map and apply to a class of compositions of ‘prototypical’ two-dimensional maps with hyperbolicity on ‘most’ of phase space.

We study the $C^{1}$-topological properties of the subset of non-uniform hyperbolic diffeomorphisms in a certain class of $C^{2}$ partially hyperbolic symplectic systems which have bounded $C^{2}$ distance to the identity. In this set, we prove the stability of non-uniform hyperbolicity as a function of the diffeomorphism and the measure, and the existence of an open and dense subset of continuity points for the center Lyapunov exponents. These results are generalized to the volume-preserving context.

We prove that generic fiber-bunched and Hölder continuous linear cocycles over a non-uniformly hyperbolic system endowed with a $u$-Gibbs measure have simple Lyapunov spectrum. This gives an affirmative answer to a conjecture proposed by Viana in the context of fiber-bunched linear cocycles.

We prove the stable ergodicity of an example of a volume-preserving, partially hyperbolic diffeomorphism introduced by Berger and Carrasco in [Berger and Carrasco. Non-uniformly hyperbolic diffeomorphisms derived from the standard map. Comm. Math. Phys.329 (2014), 239–262]. This example is robustly non-uniformly hyperbolic, with a two-dimensional center; almost every point has both positive and negative Lyapunov exponents along the center direction and does not admit a dominated splitting of the center direction. The main novelty of our proof is that we do not use accessibility.