abstract: We study visits of a dynamical system (map or flow) to small sets (like a ball or a union of balls of small radius). We consider the spatio-temporal point process corresponding to these visits. Under general assumptions, this family of point processes converges in distribution (as the measure of the small set goes to 0) to a Poisson point process. Such results hold true for chaotic billiards, for geodesic flows. We will present these results and focus on applications of these limit theorems. These results have been obtained in collaboration with Benoît Saussol.