A survey on spectral multiplicities of ergodic actions

Abstract

Given a transformation $T$ of a standard measure space $(X,\mu)$, let $\Cal M(T)$ denote the set of spectral multiplicities of the Koopman operator $U_T$ defined in $L^2(X,\mu)\ominus\Bbb C$ by $U_Tf:=f\circ T$. It is discussed in this survey paper which subsets of $\Bbb N\cup\{\infty\}$ are realizable as $\Cal M(T)$ for various $T$: ergodic, weakly mixing, mixing, Gaussian, Poisson, ergodic infinite measure preserving, etc. The corresponding constructions are considered in detail. Generalizations to actions of Abelian locally compact second countable groups are also discussed.