In this paper we develop a natural notion of continuous pseudo-measure and study the Stieltjes integral with respect to a given pseudo-measure. The common feature to these two topics is the essential appearance in both of integrals having the form

Such integrals come about naturally when one defines the energy of distributions other than measures [6]. The reasons to study continuous pseudo-measures are to find properties analogous with those of continuous measures, and to discover more about the structure of pseudo-measures because of their importance in harmonic analysis, and particularly in spectral synthesis (e.g., [4; 15]). The Stieltjes integral with respect to a pseudo-measure is studied because of its intimate relation with spectral synthesis (e.g., §5); the key observations on this matter were initially made by Beurling [6].

In what follows, a polycyclic series, for the group G, is any finite series

G = G0 ≧ G1 ≧ . . . ≧ Gl = 1

of subgroups of G, such that Gi+1 ⊲ Gi and Gi/Gi+1 is cyclic, for all i = 0, . . ., l — 1. A group that has a polycyclic series is called a polycyclic group, and if G is a polycyclic group, then the polycyclic length of G, which we denote by ρ(G), is the number of non-trivial factors of a polycyclic series for G of shortest length.

Let G be a group and N a trivial G-module. We say an element ξ ∊ H2 (G, N) is of degree ≦ n if a 2-cocycle representative of ξ is a polynomial 2-cocycle of degree ≦ n [1], Let PnH2(G, N) denote the subgroup of H2(G, N) consisting of elements with degree ≦ n. Then we have a nitration

of H2(G, N). We say that the degree of H2(G, N) is ≦ n if PnH2(G, N) = H2(G, N).

Isaacs [4] has proved the following theorem.

Theorem A. If 0 < α < 1 and

is convergent, then for u < w,

1.1