Mean equicontinuity, almost automorphy and regularity

Abstract: The aim of this article is to obtain a better understanding and classification of strictly ergodic topological dynamical systems with discrete spectrum. To that end, we first determine when an isomorphic maximal equicontinuous factor map of a minimal topological dynamical system has trivial (one point) fibres. In other words, we characterize when minimal mean equicontinuous systems are almost automorphic. Furthermore, we investigate another natural subclass of mean equicontinuous systems, so-called diam-mean equicontinuous systems, and show that a minimal system is diam-mean equicontinuous if and only if the maximal equicontinuous factor is regular (the points with trivial fibres have full Haar measure). Combined with previous results in the field, this provides a natural characterization for every step of a natural hierarchy for strictly ergodic topological models of ergodic systems with discrete spectrum. We also construct an example of a transitive almost diam-mean equicontinuous system with positive topological entropy, and we give a partial answer to a question of Furstenberg related to multiple recurrence.