Weak mixing for locally compact quantum groups

We generalize the notion of weakly mixing unitary representations to locally compact quantum groups, introducing suitable extensions of all standard characterizations of weak mixing to this setting. These results are used to complement the noncommutative Jacobs-de Leeuw-Glicksberg splitting theorem of Runde and the author [“Ergodic theory for quantum semigroups”, J. Lond. Math. Soc. (2) 89 (2014) 941-959]. Furthermore, a relation between mixing and weak mixing of state-preserving actions of discrete quantum groups and the properties of certain inclusions of von Neumann algebras, which is known for discrete groups, is demonstrated.