Notes on compact nilspaces

Notes on compact nilspaces, Discrete Analysis 2017:16, 57 pp.

This is the second paper in a two-part series. The first paper, also published in this journal, developed the algebraic theory of “nilspaces”, which are an abstraction both of the notion of a nilmanifold, and of that of an abelian group (both with their attendant parallelogram structures). In this paper, the author applies this algebraic theory to study compact nilspaces, which can be viewed as a generalization of the notion of a compact abelian group. The main motivation for this is that such compact nilspaces arise naturally when trying to attack additive combinatorial problems such as the inverse conjecture for the Gowers norms via the methods of nonstandard analysis (or ultraproducts), as was demonstrated in work of Szegedy (“On higher order Fourier analysis”).

The algebraic theory in the first part lets one describe $k$-step compact nilspaces as abelian extensions of $k-1$-step nilspaces, with the extension given by a “cocycle”. Among other things, this can be used to assign to each nilspace a probability measure that is analogous to the Haar probability measure one can assign to a compact group. However, it is not immediately obvious that this cocycle has any good measurability or continuity properties. Much of the delicate analysis in this paper (particularly those concerning the properties of continuous systems of measures) is devoted to ensuring that such good properties can be imposed (locally at least) on the cocycle, perhaps after modifying the cocycle by a suitable “coboundary” that does not affect the isomorphism class of the extension. Indeed, one can view the paper as developing some basic “cohomology” for nilspaces, although the formidable machinery of modern cohomology is not really deployed here. As with the first paper in this series, the paper closely follows the previous work of Camarena and Szegedy, but with many more details provided in the arguments. (An alternative approach to this theory has also recently been worked out in a series of papers by Gutman, Manners, and Varju.)

A full structural description of compact nilspaces seems to be quite difficult, but in this paper two important partial descriptions are obtained. The first is to describe every compact nilspace as an inverse limit of compact nilspaces of “finite rank”. This is somewhat analogous to how the Peter-Weyl theorem can be used to describe a compact group as the inverse limit of finite-dimensional compact Lie groups. The second is to show that every connected compact nilspace of finite rank is isomorphic to a nilmanifold. These results were previously obtained by Camarena and Szegedy (and later used by Szegedy to provide a new proof of the inverse conjecture for the Gowers uniformity norms), but the author here reproves these results with much more detailed proofs, in particular treating with some care certain steps that were only briefly discussed in the prior paper of Camarena and Szegedy.