The shrinking target problem for matrix transformations of tori: Revisiting the standard problem

Abstract

Let T be a d×d matrix with real coefficients. Then T determines a self-map of the d-dimensional torus Td=Rd/Zd. Let {En}n∈N be a sequence of subsets of Td and let W(T,{En}) be the set of points x∈Td such that Tn(x)∈En for infinitely many n∈N. For a large class of subsets (namely, those satisfying the so called bounded property (B) which includes balls, rectangles, and hyperboloids) we show that the d-dimensional Lebesgue measure of the shrinking target set W(T,{En}) is zero (resp. one) if a natural volume sum converges (resp. diverges). In fact, we prove a quantitative form of this zero-one criteria that describes the asymptotic behaviour of the counting function R(x,N):=#{1≤n≤N:Tn(x)∈En}. The counting result makes use of a general quantitative statement that holds for a large class measure-preserving dynamical systems (namely, those satisfying the so called summable-mixing property). We next turn our attention to the Hausdorff dimension of W(T,{En}). In the case the subsets En are balls, rectangles or hyperboloids we obtain precise formulae for the dimension. These shapes correspond, respectively, to the simultaneous, weighted and multiplicative theories of classical Diophantine approximation. The dimension results for balls generalises those obtained in [25] for integer matrices to real matrices. In the final section, we discuss various problems that stem from the results proved in the paper.