Approximately transitive dynamical systems and simple spectrum (Q636799)

Let \(\mathcal G\) be a countable discrete abelian group acting as measure preserving maps \(g\to T_g\in \text{Aut}(X, {\mathcal B}, \mu)\), where \((X, {\mathcal B}, \mu)\) is a standard Borel probability space. The action \((X, {\mathcal B}, \mu, (T_g)_{g\in {\mathcal G}})\) is called ``approximately transitive'' (AT) if given \(f_1,\dots , f_l \in L^1_+(X, {\mathcal B}, \mu)\) with \(l\geq 2\) and \(\epsilon >0\), there exist \(s\in {\mathbb Z}^+\), \(g_1, \dots , g_s\in {\mathcal G}\), \(\lambda_{j,k}\in {\mathbb R}^+\) (\(j=1, \dots l\), \(k=1,\dots , s \)) and \(f\in L^1_+(X, {\mathcal B}, \mu)\) such that \[ \| f_j - \sum\lambda_{j,k}f\circ T_{g_k} \|_1 < \epsilon, \quad 1\leq j \leq l . \] For certain such groups \({\mathcal G}\) (of the form \(\bigoplus_{n=0}^{\infty} {\mathbb Z}/p_n{\mathbb Z}\), with \(p_n\) an increasing sequence of prime numbers), examples of actions which have simple \(L^2\)-spectrum without the AT property are given. It had previously been shown by J.-P. Thouvenot that the AT property implies simple \(L^1\)-spectrum. It is still open whether AT implies simple \(L^2\)-spectrum, but in this paper the converse is shown to be false. The examples use a modification of a construction due to \textit{M. Guenais} [Ergodic Theory Dyn. Syst. 19, No. 2, 437--446 (1999; Zbl 1031.37006)]. A negative answer is also given to the question of whether funny rank-one systems coincide with simple \(L^2\)-spectrum ones.