A Cohomological Approach to Ruelle–Pollicott Resonances and Speed of Mixing of Anosov Diffeomorphisms

Abstract We investigate Ruelle–Pollicott resonances of smooth Anosov diffeomorphisms, acting on manifolds of every dimension, with respect to the measure of maximal entropy. We highlight a profound connection between resonances and eigenvalues of the action induced by the dynamics on de Rham cohomology. In particular, resonances appear as eigenvalues of a quasi-compact transfer operator acting on suitable anisotropic spaces of currents. After defining the anisotropic Banach spaces, we introduce the anisotropic de Rham cohomology and we show that it is isomorphic to the standard de Rham cohomology. The relation between resonances and cohomological eigenvalues is deduced from a comparison of spectra. We finally exploit these results to get information about the Ruelle–Pollicott asymptotics of the correlation function and to establish a cohomological bound for the speed of mixing of Anosov diffeomorphisms.