Multipliers and Disjointness from Mixing

In 2005, Parreau proved that if a measure preserving system is not strongly mixing then it contains a non-trivial factor that is disjoint from every strongly mixing system. Taking this construction as the starting point, we develop the complementary notions of $\mathcal U$-generated and $\mathcal U$-mixing systems, for a set $\mathcal U$ of ultrafilters, and use them to recover several classical results in ergodic theory as special cases of a unified framework. We prove that a system is $\mathcal U$-mixing if and only if it is disjoint from all $\mathcal U$-generated systems. In fact, we show that if $\mathcal Y$ is a $\mathcal U$-generated system and $\mathcal Z$ is disjoint from every $\mathcal U$-mixing system, then any joining of $\mathcal Y$ and $\mathcal Z$ remains disjoint from all $\mathcal U$-mixing systems. We also show that every partially rigid system is a finite extension of some $\mathcal{U}$-generated system.