Representations of nilpotent Lie groups via measurable dynamical systems

We study unitary representations associated to cocycles of measurable dynamical systems. Our main result establishes conditions on a cocycle, ensuring that ergodicity of the dynamical system under consideration is equivalent to irreducibility of its corresponding unitary representation. This general result is applied to some representations of finite-dimensional nilpotent Lie groups and to some representations of infinite-dimensional Heisenberg groups.