Pleasant extensions retaining algebraic structure, I

TL;DR

This paper develops new techniques for constructing extensions of probability-preserving systems to analyze nonconventional ergodic averages, providing new convergence results and machinery for understanding their structure.

Contribution

It introduces a general machinery for constructing extensions that recover earlier results and applies it to new convergence theorems for nonconventional averages.

Findings

New convergence results for nonconventional averages in discrete and continuous time.

Development of a machinery for constructing extensions with desirable properties.

Application to quadratic nonconventional averages showing convergence.

Abstract

In two recent papers we introduced some new techniques for constructing an extension of a probability-preserving system $T:\mathbb{Z}^d\curvearrowright (X,\mu)$ that enjoys certain desirable properties in connexion with the asymptotic behaviour of some related nonconventional ergodic averages. The present paper is the first of two that will explore various refinements and extensions of these ideas. This first part is dedicated to some much more general machinery for the construction of extensions that can be used to recover various earlier results. It also contains two relatively simple new applications of this machinery to the study of certain families of nonconventional averages, one in discrete and one in continuous time (convergence being a new result for the latter). In the forthcoming second part (arXiv:0910.0907) we will introduce the problem of describing the characteristic factors and the limit of the linear nonconventional averages $\frac{1}{N}\sum_{n=1}^N \prod_{i=1}^kf_i\circ T^{n\bf{p}_i}$ when the directions $\bf{p}_1$, $\bf{p}_2$, \ldots, $\bf{p}_k \in \mathbb{Z}^d$ are not assumed to be linearly independent, and provide a fairly detailed solution in the case when k = 3, d = 2 and any pair of directions is linearly independent. This will then be used to prove the convergence in $L^2(\mu)$ of the quadratic nonconventional averages $\frac{1}{N}\sum_{n=1}^N (f_1\circ T_1^{n^2})(f_2\circ T_1^{n^2}T_2^n)$.