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Physical measures for mostly sectionally expanding flows
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2025
Abstract
We prove that a partially hyperbolic attracting set for a 
$C^2$ vector field, having slow recurrence to equilibria, supports an ergodic physical/SRB measure if, and only if, the trapping region admits non-uniform sectional expansion on a positive Lebesgue measure subset. Moreover, in this case, the attracting set supports at most finitely many ergodic physical/SRB measures, which are also Gibbs states along the central-unstable direction. This extends to continuous time systems a similar well-known result obtained for diffeomorphisms, encompassing the presence of equilibria accumulated by regular orbits within the attracting set. In codimension two the same result holds, assuming only the trajectories on the trapping region admit a sequence of times with asymptotical sectional expansion, on a positive volume subset. We present several examples of application, including the existence of physical measures for asymptotically sectional hyperbolic attracting sets, and obtain physical measures in an alternative unified way for many known examples: Lorenz-like and Rovella attractors, and sectional-hyperbolic attracting sets (including the multidimensional Lorenz attractor).
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on Behalf of The Edinburgh Mathematical Society.
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