Recurrence in unipotent groups and ergodic nonabelian group extensions

LetT be a measure-preserving and ergodic transformation of a standard probability space (X,S, μ) and letf:X → SUT _d (ℝ) be a Borel map into the group of unipotent upper triangulard ×d matrices. We modify an argument in 12] to obtain a sufficient condition for the recurrence of the random walk defined byf, in terms of the asymptotic behaviour of the distributions of the suitably scaled mapsf(n,x)=(fT ⁿ⁻¹·fT ⁿ⁻²…fT·f). We give examples of recurrent cocycles with values in the continuous Heisenberg group H₁(ℝ)=SUT₃(ℝ), and we use a recurrent cocycle to construct an ergodic skew-product extension of an irrational rotation by the discrete Heisenberg group H₁(ℤ)=SUT₃(ℤ). The author was partially supported by the FWF research project P16004-MAT.