Metastability, Lyapunov exponents, escape rates, and topological entropy in random dynamical systems

Gary Froyland, Ognjen Stancevic

Published 2011-06-10, updated 2012-09-12Version 4

We explore the concept of metastability in random dynamical systems, focussing on connections between random Perron-Frobenius operator cocycles and escape rates of random maps, and on topological entropy of random shifts of finite type. The Lyapunov spectrum of the random Perron-Frobenius cocycle and the random adjacency matrix cocycle is used to decompose the random system into two disjoint random systems with rigorous upper and lower bounds on (i) the escape rate in the setting of random maps, and (ii) topological entropy in the setting of random shifts of finite type, respectively.