Systèmes localement de rang un (Q790977)

We say that a dynamical system is of local rank one if it can be approximated arbitrarily well by Rokhlin towers of fixed measure. We show that this property forces loosely Bernoulli (this implies the well-known result that systems of finite rank are loosely Bernoulli). Then, we show that there are loosely Bernoulli systems which are not of local rank one: namely, systems possessing the Vershik property, like those constructed by \textit{A. Rothstein} [Isr. J. Math. 36, 205-224 (1980; Zbl 0461.60054)], cannot be of local rank one. Finally, we construct an example to show that local rank one is strictly weaker than finite rank.