Stochastic constructions of flows of rank 1

Automorphisms of rank 1 appeared in the well-known papers of Chacon (1965), who constructed an example of a weakly mixing automorphism not having the strong mixing property, and Ornstein (1970), who proved the existence of mixing automorphisms without a square root. Ornstein's construction is essentially stochastic, since its parameters are chosen in a “sufficiently random manner” according to a certain random law.
In the present article it is shown that mixing flows of rank 1 exist. The construction given is also stochastic and is based to a large extent on ideas in Ornstein's paper. At the same time it complements Ornstein's paper and makes it more transparent. The construction can be used also to obtain automorphisms with various approximation and statistical properties. It is established that the new examples of dynamical systems are not isomorphic to Ornstein automorphisms, that is, they are qualitatively new.