Texas A&M University, Department of Mathematics, 216 Milner Hall, 31st of March 2004, 3:00-4:00

Groups and Dynamcs Seminar


Double ergodicity of the Poisson boundary and applications

Vadim Kaimanovich of University of Rennes I

We prove that the Poisson boundary of any spread out non-degenerate symmetric random walk on an arbitrary locally compact second countable group G is doubly M^{sep}-ergodic with respect to the class M^{sep} of separable coefficient Banach G-modules. The proof is direct and based on an analogous property of the bilateral Bernoulli shift in the space of increments of the random walk. As a corollary we obtain that any locally compact sigma-compact group G admits a measure class preserving action which is both amenable and doubly M^{sep}-ergodic. This generalizes an earlier result of Burger and Monod obtained under the assumption that G is compactly generated and allows one to dispose of this assumption in numerous applications to the theory of bounded cohomology.