Characterizing mildly mixing actions by orbit equivalence of products (Q1383519)

The notion of \textit{mildly mixing} was first introduced by \textit{H. Furstenberg} and \textit{B. Weiss} [Lect. Notes Math. 668, 127-132 (1978; Zbl 0385.28009)], and is defined as follows: a \(G\)-action \(\Phi\) is mildly mixing if for all measurable sets \(B\) with \(0<\mu(B)< 1\), one has \(\liminf_{n\to\infty}\mu(B\Delta gB)> 0\). In 1982, \textit{K. Schmidt} and \textit{P. Walters} [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc., III. Ser. 45, 506-518 (1982; Zbl 0523.28021)] characterized nonsingular mildly mixing properly ergodic \(G\)-actions; they showed that a nonsingular properly ergodic \(G\)-action \(\Phi\) is mildly mixing if and only if the product action of \(\Phi\) with any nonsingular properly ergodic action \(\Psi\) is ergodic. In this paper, the authors show that under the extra assumption that the action \(\Phi\) of \(G\) is amenable, one can obtain a new characterization in terms of orbit equivalence. Namely, that \(\Phi\) is mildly mixing if and only if the product action \(\Phi\times \Psi\) is orbit equivalent to \(\Psi\), where \(\Psi\) is as given above. In case \(G\) is countable, they show that the above conditions are equivalent to \(r(\Phi\times \Psi)= r(\Psi)\), where \(r(\Psi)\) denotes the ratio set of \(\Psi\). They also extend their main theorem to the case the action is generated by a measure-preserving noninvertible transformation \(T\) where they get a characterization in terms of the ratio set only.