Transience in law for symmetric random walks in infinite measure

Abstract

We consider a random walk on a second countable locally compact topological space endowed with an invariant Radon measure. We show that if the walk is symmetric and if every subset which is invariant by the walk has zero or infinite measure, then one has escape of mass for almost every starting point. We then apply this result in the context of homogeneous random walks on infinite volume spaces, and deduce a converse to Eskin-Margulis recurrence theorem.