A generic distal tower of arbitrary countable height over an arbitrary infinite ergodic system

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>We show the existence, over an arbitrary infinite ergodic <inline-formula><tex-math id="M1">\begin{document}$ \mathbb{Z} $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-dynamical system, of a generic ergodic relatively distal extension of arbitrary countable rank and arbitrary infinite compact extending groups (or more generally, infinite quotients of compact groups) in its canonical distal tower.</p>

Weak ergodic averages over dilated measures

Let $m\in \mathbb{N}$ and $\mathbf{X}=(X,{\mathcal{X}},\unicode[STIX]{x1D707},(T_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}})_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}\in \mathbb{R}^{m}})$ be a measure-preserving system with an $\mathbb{R}^{m}$-action. We say that a Borel measure $\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}$ on $\mathbb{R}^{m}$ is weakly equidistributed for $\mathbf{X}$ if there exists $A\subseteq \mathbb{R}$ of density 1 such that, for all $f\in L^{\infty }(\unicode[STIX]{x1D707})$, we have $$\begin{eqnarray}\lim _{t\in A,t\rightarrow \infty }\int _{\mathbb{R}^{m}}f(T_{t\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}}x)\,d\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC})=\int _{X}f\,d\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}\end{eqnarray}$$ for $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}$-almost every $x\in X$. Let $W(\mathbf{X})$ denote the collection of all $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}\in \mathbb{R}^{m}$ such that the $\mathbb{R}$-action $(T_{t\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}})_{t\in \mathbb{R}}$ is not ergodic. Under the assumption of the pointwise convergence of the double Birkhoff ergodic average, we show that a Borel measure $\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}$ on $\mathbb{R}^{m}$ is weakly equidistributed for an ergodic system $\mathbf{X}$ if and only if $\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}(W(\mathbf{X})+\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD})=0$ for every $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}\in \mathbb{R}^{m}$. Under the same assumption, we also show that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}$ is weakly equidistributed for all ergodic measure-preserving systems with $\mathbb{R}^{m}$-actions if and only if $\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}(\ell )=0$ for all hyperplanes $\ell$ of $\mathbb{R}^{m}$. Unlike many equidistribution results in literature whose proofs use methods from harmonic analysis, our results adopt a purely ergodic-theoretic approach.

Pointwise characteristic factors for Wiener–Wintner double recurrence theorem

In this paper we extend Bourgain’s double recurrence result to the Wiener–Wintner averages. Let $(X,{\mathcal{F}},{\it\mu},T)$ be a standard ergodic system. We will show that for any $f_{1},f_{2}\in L^{\infty }(X)$, the double recurrence Wiener–Wintner average $$\begin{eqnarray}\frac{1}{N}\mathop{\sum }_{n=1}^{N}f_{1}(T^{an}x)f_{2}(T^{bn}x)e^{2{\it\pi}int}\end{eqnarray}$$ converges off a single null set of $X$ independent of $t$ as $N\rightarrow \infty$. Furthermore, we will show a uniform Wiener–Wintner double recurrence result: if either $f_{1}$ or $f_{2}$ belongs to the orthogonal complement of the Conze–Lesigne factor, then there exists a set of full measure such that the supremum on $t$ of the absolute value of the averages above converges to $0$.

Rigidity and non-recurrence along sequences

We study two properties of a finite measure-preserving dynamical system and a given sequence $({n}_{m} )$ of positive integers, namely rigidity and non-recurrence. Our goal is to find conditions on the sequence which ensure that it is, or is not, a rigid sequence or a non-recurrent sequence for some weakly mixing system or more generally for some ergodic system. The main focus is on weakly mixing systems. For example, we show that for any integer $a\geq 2$ the sequence ${n}_{m} = {a}^{m} $ is a sequence of rigidity for some weakly mixing system. We show the same for the sequence of denominators of the convergents in the continued fraction expansion of any irrational $\alpha $. We also consider the stronger property of IP-rigidity. We show that if $({n}_{m} )$ grows fast enough then there is a weakly mixing system which is IP-rigid along $({n}_{m} )$ and non-recurrent along $({n}_{m} + 1)$.

Measure-theoretic chaos

We define new isomorphism invariants for ergodic measure-preserving systems on standard probability spaces, called measure-theoretic chaos and measure-theoretic$^+$ chaos. These notions are analogs of the topological chaos DC2 and its slightly stronger version (which we denote by $\text {DC}1\frac 12$). We prove that: (1) if a topological system is measure-theoretically (measure-theoretically$^+$) chaotic with respect to at least one of its ergodic measures then it is topologically DC2 $(\text {DC}1\frac 12)$ chaotic; (2) every ergodic system with positive Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy is measure-theoretically$^+$ chaotic (even in a slightly stronger uniform sense). We provide an example showing that the latter statement cannot be reversed, that is, of a system of entropy zero with uniform measure-theoretic$^+$chaos.