Characters on the full group of an ergodic hyperfinite equivalence relation (Q639523)

Let \(X=\prod_1^\infty\{0,1\}\) be the space of all sequences of \(0\)'s and \(1\)'s, with the usual product topology. Let \(E\) be the \textit{tail-equivalence relation} on \(X\), i.e., \(xEy\) means that \(x_k=y_k\) for all sufficiently-large \(k\in\mathbb{N}\). Let \([E]\) denote the \textit{full group of \(E\)}, the group of all Borel automorphisms \(S\) of \(X\) such that \(S(x)Ex\) for all \(x\in X\). The object of this paper is to describe the indecomposable characters of the group \([E]\). Recall that a character on a group \(G\) is a positive-definite class function \(\chi:G\to\mathbb{C}\) sending \(1\mapsto1\), i.e., a function such that (1) \(\chi(g_1g_2)=\chi(g_2g_1)\), (2) the matrix \((\chi(g_ig_j^{-1}))_{i,j=1}^n\) is nonnegative definite for all \(n\in\mathbb{N}\) and all \(g_i,g_j\in G\), and (3) \(\chi(1_G)=1\). A character is indecomposable if it is an extreme point in the convex set of characters. The indecomposable characters are in bijective correspondence with the so-called finite-type factor representations of \(G\). The description obtained in the paper uses the standard probability measure \(\mu\) on \(X\) obtained by taking products of the measure on \(\{0,1\}\) that assigns mass \(\frac12\) to each of the two singletons. It turns out that the indecomposable characters are indexed by the parameters \(\alpha\in\mathbb{N}\cup\{\infty\}\) and the one corresponding to a given \(\alpha\) is the (nonnegative) function \(\chi\) on \([E]\) given by \[ \chi(f) = \mu( \mathrm{Fix}(f) )^\alpha,\;\forall f\in [E], \] where \(\mathrm{Fix}(f)\) denotes the set of points fixed by \(f\). Here, the conventions on exceptional powers are that \(0^0=1\), \(x^\infty=0\) for any \(x\in[0,1)\), and \(1^\infty=1\). This result is obtained as a corollary of the main theorem, which gives a similar description of the indecomposable characters on a dense subgroup of \([E]\), denoted \(S(2^\infty)\), which is an inductive limit of the finite symmetric groups \(S(2^n)\), thought of as the permutation groups on paths in the binary tree of height \(n\). The methods used are stated to be related to methods of Olshanski and Okounkov, used to give a new proof of Thoma's 1964 theorem on the indecomposable characters on the infinite symmetric group \(S(\infty) = \lim_{\rightarrow}S(n)\).