Recurrence times and rates of mixing for invertible dynamical systems

We consider invertible discrete-time dynamical systems having a hyperbolic product structure in some region of the phase space with infinitely many branches and variable recurrence time. We show that the decay of correlations of the SRB measure associated to that hyperbolic structure is related to the tail of the recurrence times. We also give sufficient conditions for the validity of the Central Limit Theorem. This generalizes previous results by Benedicks and Young.