English

Non-stability of Liouville measures under convex combinations

Group Theory 2026-02-03 v1 Dynamical Systems Probability

Abstract

For every non-hyper-FC-central countable amenable group and every k2k\geq 2, we provide a sequence of symmetric, fully supported probability measures such that their convex combination is non-Liouville (that is it admits a non-constant bounded harmonic function, equivalently, the Poisson boundary is non-trivial) if and only if at least kk of them appear in the convex combination. Particularly, our result implies that the set of Liouville measures is not closed under convex combination, which answers a question of Kaimanovich. We also provide a similar result under the additional assumption of finite entropy for those non-hyper-FC-central countable groups with the property that every symmetric, finitely supported probability measure is Liouville. These groups are the only known non-trivial examples of countable groups that admit Liouville measures with finite entropy. Examples include the lamplighter group over Z\mathbb{Z} and Z2\mathbb{Z}^2, and the infinite symmetric group of finite permutations on Z\mathbb{Z}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.01318,
  title  = {Non-stability of Liouville measures under convex combinations},
  author = {Behrang Forghani and Joshua Frisch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.01318},
  year   = {2026}
}