Mixing on a Class of Rank One Transformations.pdfVIP

Mixing on a Class of Rank One Transformations ? Darren Creutz ? Cesar E. Silva ? October 17, 2001, March 30, 2003 Abstract We prove that a rank one transformation satisfying a condition called restricted growth is a mixing transformation if and only if the spacer se- quence for the transformation is uniformly ergodic. Uniform ergodicity is a generalization of the notion of ergodicity for sequences, in the sense that the mean ergodic theorem holds for a family of what we call dy- namical sequences. The application of our theorem shows that the class of polynomial rank one transformations, rank one transformations where the spacers are chosen to be the values of a polynomial with some mild conditions on the polynomials, that have restricted growth are mixing transformations, implying in particular Adams’ result on staircase trans- formations. Another application yields a new proof that Ornstein’s class of rank one transformations constructed using “random spacers” are al- most surely mixing transformations. 1 Introduction 1.1. Background. Rank one transformations are transformations defined in- ductively using at each step a single Rohlin tower or column. They gained importance with Ornstein’s construction of a mixing transformation with no square root [Or72], and have been used as a source of examples and counterex- amples in ergodic theory. Rank one mixing transformations have been shown to enjoy many interesting properties. It is now known that rank one mixing transformations are mixing of all orders [Ka84], [Ry93] and have the property of minimal self-joinings, [Ki88], and in particular they are prime and have trivial centralizer [R79] . We refer to [Fr70] for rank one constructions and [Fe97] for a more recent survey of results. 1.2. History. Ornstein’s construction of a rank one mixing transformation uses the notion of “random spacers” and yields a class of transformations so that al- most surely a transformation in this class is mixing. These methods were used