This is a corrigendum to the paper ‘A spectral refinement of the Bergelson–Host–Kra decomposition and new multiple ergodic theorems’ [3]. Theorem 7.1 in that paper is incorrect as stated, and the error originates with Proposition 7.5, part (iii), which was incorrectly quoted from a paper by Bergelson, Host, and Kra [1]. Consequently, this invalidates the proof of Theorem 4.2, which was used in the proofs of the main results in [3]. In this corrigendum we fix the problem by establishing a slightly weaker version of Theorem 7.1 (see §2 below) and use it to give a new proof of Theorem 4.2 (see §3 below). This ensures that all main results in [3] remain correct. We thank Zhengxing Lian and Jiahao Qiu for bringing this mistake to our attention.

In this paper, we will introduce the ‘grid method’ to prove that the extreme case of oscillation occurs for the averages obtained by sampling a flow along the sequence of times of the form $\{n^\alpha : n\in {\mathbb {N}}\}$, where $\alpha $ is a positive non-integer rational number. Such behavior of a sequence is known as the strong sweeping-out property. By using the same method, we will give an example of a general class of sequences which satisfy the strong sweeping-out property. This class of sequences may be useful to solve a long-standing open problem: for a given irrational $\alpha $, whether the sequence $(n^\alpha )$ is bad for pointwise ergodic theorem in $L^2$ or not. In the process of proving this result, we will also prove a continuous version of the Conze principle.

Given a subshift $\Sigma $ of finite type and a finite set S of finite words, let $\Sigma \langle S\rangle $ denote the subshift of $\Sigma $ that avoids S. We establish a general criterion under which we can bound the entropy perturbation $h(\Sigma ) - h(\Sigma \langle S\rangle )$ from above. As an application, we prove that this entropy difference tends to zero with a sequence of such sets $S_1, S_2,\ldots $ under various assumptions on the $S_i$.