A Banach space-valued ergodic theorem for amenable groups and applications

Abstract

In this paper we study unimodular amenable groups. The first part is devoted to results on the existence of uniform families of epsilon-quasi tilings for these groups. In this context, constructions of Ornstein and Weiss are extended by quantitative estimates for the covering properties of the corresponding decompositions. Afterwards, we apply the developed methods to obtain an abstract ergodic theorem for a class of functions mapping subsets of a countable, amenable group into some Banach space. This significantly extends and complements the previous results of Lenz, M\"uller, Schwarzenberger and Veseli\'c. Further, using the Lindenstrauss ergodic theorem, we describe a link of our results to classical ergodic theory. We conclude with two important applications: the uniform approximation of the integrated density of states on amenable Cayley graphs, as well as the almost-sure convergence of cluster densities in an amenable bond percolation model.