Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
A discrete group $G$ is called identity excluding if the only irreducible unitary representation of
$G$ which weakly contains the 1-dimensional identity representation is the 1-dimensional identity representation itself. Given a unitary representation
$\pi $ of
$G$ and a probability measure
$\mu $ on
$G$, let
${{P}_{\mu }}$ denote the
$\mu $-average
$\int{\pi (g)\mu (dg)}$. The goal of this article is twofold: (1) to study the asymptotic behaviour of the powers
$P_{\mu }^{n}$, and (2) to provide a characterization of countable amenable identity excluding groups. We prove that for every adapted probability measure
$\mu $ on an identity excluding group and every unitary representation
$\pi $ there exists and orthogonal projection
${{E}_{\mu }}$ onto a
$\pi $-invariant subspace such that
$s-{{\lim }_{n\to \infty }}\,(P_{\mu }^{n}\,-\,\pi {{(a)}^{n}}\,{{E}_{\mu }})\,\,=\,0$ for every
$a\,\in $ supp
$\mu $. This also remains true for suitably defined identity excluding locally compact groups. We show that the class of countable amenable identity excluding groups coincides with the class of
$\text{FC}$-hypercentral groups; in the finitely generated case this is precisely the class of groups of polynomial growth. We also establish that every adapted random walk on a countable amenable identity excluding group is ergodic.