Topological ergodic decompositions and applications to products of powers of a minimal transformation (Q1343314)

The author develops some interesting topological analogues to ideas of H. Furstenberg on multiple recurrence and ergodic decompositions. Given a system \((X,T)\) of an appropriate type and a positive integer \(n\), describe the most general relation that holds for \((n + 1)\)tuples \((x,Tx, \dots, T^nx)\) in the product space \(X \times \dots \times X\) \((n + 1\) times). Let \(\tau (x) = (Tx, T^2x, \dots, T^nx)\). In the measure theoretic situation, one of Furstenberg's tools was the idea of a characteristic factor. The author follows this idea in the topological situation. Let \((X,T)\) be a minimal flow, then we seek the smallest characteristic factor \((Y,T)\) in the following sense: there exists a dense \(G_\delta\) subset \(\Omega\) of \(X\) such that for \(x \in (Y,T)\) the orbit closure \(L = \text{cl} \{\tau^k (x) : k \in \mathbb{Z}\}\) is \(\pi\) saturated \(((X,T) @>\pi>> (Y,T))\), viz. \((x_1, \dots, x_n) \in L\) iff \((x_1', \dots, x_n') \in L\) whenever \(\pi (x_i) = \pi (x_i')\) for all \(i\). It is proved that, up to a canonically defined proximal extension, a characteristic family for \(\tau\) is the family of canonical PI flows of class \(n - 1\). Denoting the appropriate PI tower by \(\widetilde X\), the main theorem is thus: Theorem: Let \((X,T)\) be a metric minimal flow and let \(n \geq 1\) be a positive integer. Then there exists a dense \(G_\delta\) subset \(\Omega\) of \(\widetilde X\) such that for \(x \in \Omega \), \(L\) is \(\pi\)-saturated. This theorem has nice corollaries in the distal and weak mixing cases. If \((X,T)\) is distal, then \(\widetilde X = X\) and \(\pi\) denotes the canonical map of \(X\) onto its largest class \(n\) distal factor. When \((X,T)\) is weak mixing, each \(\pi\) is trivial and so there is a dense \(G_\delta\) set of points with dense orbits under \(\tau\).