English

Product set phenomena for measured groups

Dynamical Systems 2016-06-03 v1 Group Theory Number Theory

Abstract

Following the works of Furstenberg and Glasner on stationary means, we strengthen and extend in this paper some recent results by Di Nasso, Goldbring, Jin, Leth, Lupini and Mahlburg on piecewise syndeticity of product sets in countable \textsc{amenable} groups to general countable measured groups. We point out several fundamental differences between the behavior of products of "large" sets in Liouville and non-Liouville measured groups. As a (very) special case of our main results, we show that if GG is a free group of finite rank, and AA and BB are "spherically large" subsets of GG, then there exists a finite set FGF \subset G such that AFBAFB is thick. The position of the set FF is curious, but seems to be necessary; in fact, we can produce \emph{left thick} sets A,BGA, B \subset G such that BB is "spherically large", but ABAB is \emph{not} piecewise syndetic. On the other hand, if AA is spherically large, then AA1AA^{-1} is always piecewise syndetic \emph{and} left piecewise syndetic. However, contrary to what happens for amenable groups, AA1AA^{-1} may fail to be syndetic. The same phenomena occur for many other (even amenable, but non-Liouville) measured groups. Our proofs are based on some ergodic-theoretical results concerning stationary actions which should be of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.00616,
  title  = {Product set phenomena for measured groups},
  author = {Michael Björklund},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.00616},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

25 pages, no figures, comments are welcome!

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:15:45.428Z