Aspects of Recurrence and Transience for Levy Processes in Transformation Groups and Non-Compact Riemannian Symmetric Pairs

Abstract

We study recurrence and transience for Lévy processes induced by topological transformation groups. In particular the transience-recurrence dichotomy in terms of potential measures is established and transience is shown to be equivalent to the potential measure having finite mass on compact sets when the group acts transitively. It is known that all bi-invariant Lévy processes acting in irreducible Riemannian symmetric pairs of non-compact type are transient. We show that we also have "harmonic transience", i.e. local integrability of the inverse of the real part of the characteristic exponent which is associated to the process by means of Gangolli's Lévy-Khinchine formula.