On the Jacobs-de Leeuw-Glicksberg decomposition for representations of semigroups

Abstract

We develop a systematic study of the Jacobs-de Leeuw-Glicksberg decomposition for JdLG-admissible semigroup representations on Banach spaces, with emphasis on its structural, ergodic, and combinatorial aspects. For a JdLG-admissible representation $\pi$ of a semigroup $S$ on a Banach space $E$, we show that the reversible part is weakly equivalent to a unitary representation on a Hilbert space that decomposes as a direct sum of finite-dimensional representations. We also characterize the almost weakly stable part in terms of the unique invariant mean on the space of weakly almost periodic functions. When $S$ is a bi-amenable measured semigroup, we obtain further characterizations of the almost weakly stable part using invariant means and averages along F\o lner sequences. In addition, we describe, in terms of ultrafilters, the unique projection onto the reversible part whose kernel is the almost weakly stable part, and derive several combinatorial consequences. A range of examples are given to demonstrate the sharpness of our results. Many of our theorems extend known features of the compact-weak mixing decomposition for unitary operators; although some auxiliary results were previously known or part of the folklore, their extension to this general setting, particularly for nonseparable Banach spaces, requires new ideas.