  The goal of this article is to point out the importance of spatio-temporal
processes in different questions of quantitative recurrence. We focus on
applications to the study of the number of visits to a small set before the
first visit to another set (question arising from a previous work by Kifer and
Rapaport), the study of high records, the study of line processes, the study of
the time spent by a flow in a small set. We illustrate these applications by
results on billiards or geodesic flows. This paper contains in particular new
result of convergence in distribution of the spatio temporal processes
associated to visits by the Sinai billiard flow to a small neighbourhood of
orbitrary points in the billiard domain.
