An Effective Contraction Estimate in the Stable Subspaces of Phase Points in Hard Ball Systems

In this paper we prove the following result, useful and often needed in the study of the ergodic properties of hard ball systems: In any such system, for any phase point x with a non-singular forward trajectory and infinitely many connected collision graphs on that forward orbit, it is true that for any small number epsilon there is a stable tangent vector w of x and a large enough time t>>1 so that the vector w undergoes a contraction by a factor of less than epsilon in time t. Of course, the Multiplicative Ergodic Theorem of Oseledets provides a much stronger conclusion, but at the expense of an unspecified zero-measured exceptional set of phase points, and this is not sufficient in the sophisticated studies the ergodic properties of such flows. Here the exceptional set of phase points is a dynamically characterized set, so that it suffices for the proofs showing how global ergodicity follows from the localone.