On ergodic measure-preserving transformations defined on an infinite measure space

Abstract

Few, if any, of the properties enjoyed by ergodic measure-preserving transformations defined on a finite measure space generalize in a natural way to those defined on an infinite measure space. Concrete examples of ergodic transformations which preserve a finite measure and ones which preserve an infinite measure exist in the literature, see [1]. It is not difficult to see that ergodic transformations never admit wandering sets of positive measure. In [2 ] it was shown that a basic difference exists between ergodic transformations which preserve a finite measure and those which preserve an infinite measure; namely, an ergodic measure-preserving transformation defined on an infinite measure space always admits weakly wandering sets of positive measure (Theorem 2 of [2]). Unlike wandering sets, it is not true in general that the union of two weakly wandering sets is again a weakly wandering set even if we require that a class of mutually disjoint images of one weakly wandering set does not intersect a class of mutually disjoint images of the other. One may ask then if there are any ergodic measure-preserving transformations defined on an infinite measure space which admit only weakly wandering sets of finite measure. In this paper we show that this is not the case. We prove that there always exist weakly wandering sets of infinite measure for any ergodic measure-preserving transformation defined on an infinite measure space (Theorem 3). In [2] the existence of a weakly wandering set of positive measure for an ergodic measure-preserving transformation defined on an infinite measure space was discovered while studying the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a finite, invariant, and equivalent measure for a given measurable and nonsingular transformation. In this paper we construct the weakly wandering sets in a different way. Using the pointwise ergodic theorem we prove a simple and yet a useful fact about ergodic measure-preserving transformations defined on an infinite measure space (Theorem 2). It states that given two sets A and B both of finite measure, it is possible to find an image of A under some power of the transformation T which has small intersection with the set B. This fact is basic in proving Lemma 1 which shows the existence of a