Regularity of topological cocycles of a class of non-isometric minimal homeomorphisms

Abstract

We study topological cocycles of a class of non-isometric distal minimal homeomorphisms of multidimensional tori, introduced by Furstenberg in [5] as iterated skew product extensions by the torus, starting with an irrational rotation.We prove that there are no topological type ${III}_0$ cocycles of these homeomorphisms with values in an Abelian locally compact group.Moreover, under the assumption that the Abelian locally compact group has no non-trivial connected compact subgroup, we show that a topologically recurrent cocycle is always regular, i.e. it is topologically cohomologous to a cocycle with values only in the essential range.These properties are well-known for topological cocycles of minimal rotations on compact metric groups (cf. [6], [2], [9], and [10]), but the distal minimal homeomorphisms considered in this paper are far from the isometric behaviour of minimal rotations and do not admit rigidity times.