Weak amenability and semidirect products in simple Lie groups.
We show that if ϕ is a continuous homomorphism between weighted convolution algebras on ℝ⁺, then its extension to the corresponding measure algebras is always weak* continuous. A key step in the proof is showing that our earlier result that normalized powers of functions in a convolution algebra on ℝ⁺ go to zero weak* is also true for most measures in the corresponding measure algebra. For some algebras, we can determine precisely which measures have normalized powers converging to zero weak*. We...