The structure of skew products with ergodic group automorphisms

We prove that ergodic automorphisms of compact groups are Bernoulli shifts, and that skew products with such automorphisms are isomorphic to direct products. We give a simple geometric demonstration of Yuzvinskii’s basic result in the calculation of entropy for group automorphisms, and show that the set of possible values for entropy is one of two alternatives, depending on the answer to an open problem in algebraic number theory. We also classify those algebraic factors of a group automorphism that are complemented.