Contractive Automorphisms of Locally Compact Groups and the Concentration Function Problem

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Let G be a noncompact locally compact group. We show that a necessary and sufficient condition in order that G support an adapted probability measure whose concentration functions fail converge to zero is that G be the semidirect product \(N \times _\tau \mathbb{Z}\), where τ is an automorphism of N contractive modulo a compact subgroup. Any adapted a probability measure whose concentration functions fail to converge to zero has the form μ=v×δ1 where v is a probability measure on N. If G is unimodular then the concentration functions of an adapted probability measure μ fail to converge to zero if and only if μ is supported on a coset of a compact normal subgroup.