Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 September 2016
We prove two generalizations of Furstenberg’s Diophantine result regarding the density of an orbit of an irrational point in the $1$-torus under the action of multiplication by a non-lacunary multiplicative semigroup of $\mathbb{N}$. We show that for any sequences $\{a_{n}\},\{b_{n}\}\subset \mathbb{Z}$ for which the quotients of successive elements tend to $1$ as $n$ goes to infinity, and any infinite sequence $\{c_{n}\}$, the set $\{a_{n}b_{m}c_{k}x:n,m,k\in \mathbb{N}\}$ is dense modulo $1$ for every irrational $x$. Moreover, by ergodic-theoretical methods, we prove that if $\{a_{n}\},\{b_{n}\}$ are a sequence having smooth $p$-adic interpolation for some prime number $p$, then for every irrational $x$, the sequence $\{p^{n}a_{m}b_{k}x:n,m,k\in \mathbb{N}\}$ is dense modulo 1.