Weakly wandering sets and compressibility in descriptive setting (Q1329250)

A Borel automorphism \(T\) on a standard Borel space \((X, B)\) is constructed such that (a) there is no probability measure invariant under \(T\), and (b) there is no Borel set \(W\) which is weakly wandering under \(T\) (i.e., there exists a strictly increasing sequence \(n_i\) such that the sets \(T^{n_i} W\) are disjoint), and for which the union of all \(T^n W\) is all of \(X\). This shows that a natural descriptive version of the Hajian-Kakutani theorem fails to hold, and it answers a question raised in 1990 by the third author.