American Institute of Mathematical Sciences

We are interested in the asymptotic behaviour of the first return time of the orbits of a dynamical system into a small neighbourhood of their starting points. We study this quantity in the context of dynamical systems preserving an infinite measure. More precisely, we consider the case of $\mathbb{Z}$-extensions of subshifts of finite type. We also consider a toy probabilistic model to enlight the strategy of our proofs.