Rigidityofmultiparameteractions-EinsteinInstituteof.PDFVIP

RIGIDITY OF MULTIPARAMETER ACTIONS ELON LINDENSTRAUSS 0. Prologue In this survey I would like to expose recent developments and ap- plications of the study of the rigidity properties of natural algebraic actions of multidimensional abelian groups. This study was initiated by Hillel Furstenberg in his landmark paper [Fur67]. The survey is an outgrowth of notes I gave to a series of lectures in the II Workshop on Dynamics and Randomness in December 2002; a related talk was given also in the Conference on Probability in Math- ematics in honor of Hillel Furstenberg. It is not intended to be an exhaustive survey, and is skewed towards the problems I have worked on and which I know best. In particular, I make no mention of Zd actions on zero dimensional compact groups such as Ledrappier’s ex- 2 ample of a 2-mixing but not 3-mixing Z -action [Sch95, Intr.] — a deficiency that is partially mitigated by the existence of several good surveys, for example [Sch03]. It has been my good fortune to have been able to learn ergodic the- ory from Benjamin Weiss, Hillel’s long term collaborator and friend, and from Hillel himself during my graduate studies in the Hebrew Uni- versity. To the problems mentioned here I have been introduced by numerous discussions (as well as collaborations) with David Meiri, Sha- har Mozes, Yuval Peres and Barak Weiss, all of whom were students of Hillel, as well as with Hillel himself. It is therefore with great pleasure that I dedicate this survey to Hillel, on occasion of his retirement. Af- ter graduating, I met Peter Sarnak and learned from him many things, including about the quantum unique ergodicity problem, which is fortu- itously connected to precisely these kind of questions