Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 August 2012
We study non-recurrence sets for weakly mixing dynamical systems by using linear dynamical systems. These are systems consisting of a bounded linear operator acting on a separable complex Banach space $X$, which becomes a probability space when endowed with a non-degenerate Gaussian measure. We generalize some recent results of Bergelson, del Junco, Lemańczyk and Rosenblatt, and show in particular that sets $\{n_{k}\}$ such that $n_{k+1}/n_{k}\to +\infty $, or such that $n_{k}$ divides $n_{k+1}$ for each $k\ge 0$, are non-recurrence sets for weakly mixing linear dynamical systems. We also give examples, for each $r\ge 1$, of $r$-Bohr sets which are non-recurrence sets for some weakly mixing systems.