Upper bounds for measures on distal classes

Abstract

In recent work, Harman and Snowden introduced a notion of measure on a Fra\"iss\'e class $\mathfrak{F}$, and showed how such measures lead to interesting tensor categories. Constructing and classifying measures is a difficult problem, and so far only a handful of cases have been worked out. In this paper, we obtain some of the first general results on measures. Our main theorem states that if $\mathfrak{F}$ is distal (in the sense of Simon), and there are some bounds on automorphism groups, then $\mathfrak{F}$ admits only finitely many measures; moreover, we give an effective upper bound on their number. For example, if $\mathfrak{F}$ is the class of ``$s$-dimensional permutations'' (finite sets equipped with $s$ total orders), we show that the number of measures is bounded above by approximately $\exp(\exp(s^2 \log{s}))$.