Towers for commuting endomorphisms, and combinatorial applications (Q507074)

\textit{V. A. Rokhlin} [Dokl. Akad. Nauk SSSR, n. Ser. 60, 349--351 (1948; Zbl 0033.06601)] showed that any aperiodic measure-preserving automorphism of a standard probability space without atoms has the following `tower' property: for any \(\epsilon>0\) and \(n\geq1\) there is a measurable `base' set \(B\) for which the sets \(B\), \(T^{-1}B\),\dots, \(T^{-(n-1)}B\) are all disjoint and together cover all but at most \(\epsilon\) in measure of the space. That is, to within a small error, the dynamics can be described as a simple stepping up through a tower of layers, with all the complications squeezed into an arbitrarily small part of the space. Generalizations to measure-preserving group actions take this in one direction; here the non-invertible case is considered where some new issues come into play. The main theorem gives a form of Rokhlin lemma for actions of \(\mathbb N_0^d\), and several combinatorial applications of the result are described.