This manuscript represents the author's PhD dissertation thesis.The first part studies decision problems in Thompson's groups F,T,V and some generalizations. The simultaneous conjugacy problem is determined to be solvable for Thompson's group F and suitable larger groups of piecewise-linear homeomorphisms of the unit interval. We determine algorithms to compute roots and centralizers in these groups and to detect periodic points and their behavior by looking at a particular diagram associated to an element.
In the second part, we describe the structure of subgroups of the group of all homeomorphisms of the unit circle, with the additional requirement that they contain no non-abelian free subgroup. It is shown that in this setting the rotation number map is a group homomorphism. We give a classification of such subgroups as subgroups of certain wreath products and we show that such subgroups can exist by building examples. Similar techniques are then used to compute centralizers in these groups.
The Tarski number of a non amenable group is the smallest number of pieces needed for a paradoxical decomposition of the group. Non amenable groups of piecewise projective homeomorphisms were introduced by Monod, and non amenable finitely presented groups of piecewise projective homeomorphisms were introduced by the author in joint work with Justin Moore. These groups do not contain non abelian free subgroups. In this article we prove that the Tarski number of all groups in both families is at most 25. In particular we demonstrate the existence of a paradoxical decomposition with 25 pieces. Ou…
Monod introduced in [14] a family of Thompson-like groups which provides natural counterexamples to the von Neumann-Day conjecture. We construct a characterization of conjugacy and invariant and use them to compute centralizers in one group of this family.
In this article we will describe a finitely presented subgroup of Monod's group of piecewise projective homeomorphisms of R. This in particular provides a new example of a finitely presented group which is nonamenable and yet does not contain a nonabelian free subgroup. It is in fact the first such example which is torsion free. We will also develop a means for representing the elements of the group by labeled tree diagrams in a manner which closely parallels Richard Thompson's group F.
In 2012 Monod introduced examples of groups of piecewise projective homeomorphisms which are not amenable and which do not contain free subgroups, and later Lodha and Moore introduced examples of finitely presented groups with the same property. In this article we examine the normal subgroup structure of these groups. Two important cases of our results are the groups $H$ and $G_0$. We show that the group $H$ of piecewise projective homeomorphisms of $\mathbb{R}$ has the property that $H"$ is simple and that every proper quotient of $H$ is metabelian. We establish simplicity of the commutator s…
We prove that the group of homeomorphisms of the circle introduced by the author with Justin Moore (Groups, Geometry and Dynamics 2015) is of type $F_{\infty}$. This makes the group the first example of a type $F_{\infty}$ group which is nonamenable and does not contain nonabelian free subgroups. To prove our result we provide a certain generalisation of cube complexes, which we refer to as cluster complexes. We also obtain a computable normal form, or a canonical unique choice of a word for each element of the group.
In this work we study the following realization problem: given a piecewise homeomorphism $Φ: S^1 \rightarrow S^1$, which geometrical and dynamical conditions on $Φ$ are sufficient to realize it as a Bowen-Series-like map associated to a surface group, seen as a discrete subgroup of ${\rm Homeo}^+ (S^1)$?
We describe the relation between two characterizations of conjugacy in groups of piecewise-linear homeomorphisms, discovered by Brin and Squier in [2] and Kassabov and Matucci in [5]. Thanks to the interplay between the techniques, we produce a simplified point of view of conjugacy that allows us to easily recover centralizers and lends itself to generalization.
We construct a finitely presented, infinite, simple group that acts by homeomorphisms on the circle, but does not admit a non-trivial action by $C^1$-diffeomorphisms on the circle. The group emerges as a group of piecewise projective homeomorphisms of $S^1=\mathbf{R}\cup \{\infty\}$. However, we show that it does not admit a non-trivial action by piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the circle. Another interesting and new feature of this example is that it produces a non amenable orbit equivalence relation with respect to the Lebesgue measure.
The group of piecewise projective homeomorphisms of the line provides straightforward counter-examples to the so-called von Neumann conjecture. The examples are so simple that many additional properties can be established.
For a certain class of groups of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the interval, we prove that they admit no sufficiently regular faithful action on the line. Building on previous work of Brum, Matte Bon, Rivas, and the author [arXiv:2104.14678], the new ingredient is an observation from a recent work of Hyde and Tatch Moore [arXiv:2103.14911], which allows to reduce the problem to the case of the circle, and then apply Herman-Yoccoz theory.
An element of a group is \emph{reversible} if it is conjugate to its own inverse, and it is \emph{strongly reversible} if it is conjugate to its inverse by an involution. A group element is strongly reversible if and only if it can be expressed as a composite of two involutions. In this paper the reversible maps, the strongly reversible maps, and those maps that can be expressed as a composite of involutions are determined in certain groups of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the real line.
The Lodha-Moore group $G$ first arose as a finitely presented counterexample to von Neumann's conjecture. The group $G$ acts on the unit interval via piecewise projective homemorphisms. A result of Lodha shows that $G$ in fact has type $F_{\infty}$. Here we will describe $G$ as a group that is "locally determined" by an inverse semigroup $S_{2}$, in the sense of the author's joint work with Hughes. The semigroup $S_{2}$ is generated by three linear fractional transformations $A$, $B$, and $C_{2}$, where $A$ and $B$ are elliptical transformations of the hyperbolic plane and $C_{2}$ is a hyperbo…
Guba and Sapir asked if the simultaneous conjugacy problem was solvable in Diagram Groups or, at least, for Thompson's group F. We give a solution to the latter question using elementary techniques which rely purely on the description of F as the group of piecewise linear orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of the unit interval. The techniques we develop extend the ones used by Brin and Squier allowing us to compute roots and centralizers as well. Moreover, these techniques can be generalized to solve the same question in larger groups of piecewise-linear homeomorphisms.
We show that the group of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of any compact PL manifold does not admit a Polish group topology. This uses a) new results on the relationship between topologies on groups of homeomorphisms, their algebraic structure, and the topology of the underlying manifold, and b) new results on the structure of certain subgroups of PL(M). The proof also shows that the group of piecewise projective homeomorphisms of the circle has no Polish group topology.
We show that given a compact minimal system $(X,g)$ and an element $h$ of the topological full group $τ[g]$ of $g$, then the infinite orbits of $h$ admit a locally constant orientation with respect to the orbits of $g$. We use this to obtain a clopen partition of $(X,G)$ into minimal and periodic parts, where $G$ is any virtually polycyclic subgroup of $τ[g]$. We also use the orientation of orbits to give a refinement of the index map and to describe the role in $τ[g]$ of the submonoid generated by the induced transformations of $g$. Finally, we consider the problem, given a homeomorphism $h$ …
We investigate subgroups of the group PLo(I) of piecewise-linear, orientation preserving homeomorphisms of the unit interval with finitely many breaks in slope, and also subgroups of Thompson's group F. We find geometric criteria determining the derived length of any such group, and use this criteria to classify the solvable and non-solvable subgroups of PLo(I) and of F. Let H be a subgroup of PL_o(I) or F. We find that H is solvable if and only if H is isomorphic to a group in a well described class R of groups. We also find that H is non-solvable if and only if we can embed a copy of a speci…
To every dynamical system $(X,φ)$ over a totally disconnected compact space, we associate a left-orderable group $T(φ)$. It is defined as a group of homeomorphisms of the suspension of $(X,φ)$ which preserve every orbit of the suspension flow and act by dyadic piecewise linear homeomorphisms in the flow direction. We show that if the system is minimal, the group is simple, and if it is a subshift then the group is finitely generated. The proofs of these two statements are short and elementary, providing straightforward examples of finitely generated simple left-orderable groups. We show that i…
We show that for a large class $\mathcal{C}$ of finitely generated groups of orientation preserving homeomorphisms of the real line, the following holds: Given a group $G$ of rank $k$ in $\mathcal{C}$, there is a sequence of $k$-markings $(G, S_n), n\in \mathbf{N}$ whose limit in the space of marked groups is the free group of rank $k$ with the standard marking. The class we consider consists of groups that admit actions satisfying mild dynamical conditions and a certain "self-similarity" type hypothesis. Examples include Thompson's group $F$, Higman-Thompson groups, Stein-Thompson groups, var…
We look at the automorphisms of Thompson type groups of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the real line or circle that use slopes that are integral powers of a fixed integer n with n>2. We show that large numbers of "exotic" automorphisms appear---automorphisms that are represented as conjugation by non-PL homeomorphisms of the real line or circle. This is in contrast to the n=2 case where no such automorphisms appear.
The group $\mathop{\rm PL}_+(I)$ of increasing piecewise linear self-homeomorphisms of the interval $I=[0,1]$ may not be assigned a topology in such a way that it becomes a Polish group. The same statement holds for the groups $\mathop{\rm Homeo}_+^{Lip}(I)$ of bi-Lipschitz homeomorphisms of $I$, and $\mathop{\rm Diff}_+^{1+ε}(I)$ of diffeomorphisms of $I$ whose derivatives are Hölder continuous with exponent $ε$.
Let PL+(S1) be the group of order preserving piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the circle. An element in PL+(S1) is called reversible in PL+(S1) if it is conjugate to its inverse in PL+(S1). We characterize the reversible elements in PL+(S1). We also perform a sim- ilar characterisation in the full group PL(S1) of piecewise linear home- omorphisms of the circle.
The set of finitely generated subgroups of the group $PL_+(I)$ of orientation-preserving piecewise-linear homeomorphisms of the unit interval includes many important groups, most notably R.~Thompson's group $F$. In this paper we show that every finitely generated subgroup $G<PL_+(I)$ is either soluble, or contains an embedded copy of Brin's group $B$, a finitely generated, non-soluble group, which verifies a conjecture of the first author from 2009. In the case that $G$ is soluble, we show that the derived length of $G$ is bounded above by the number of breakpoints of any finite set of generat…
Let $PL_0(I)$ represent the group of orientation-preserving piecewise-linear homeomorphisms of the unit interval which admit finitely many breaks in slope, under the operation of composition. We find a non-solvable group $W$ and show that $W$ embeds in every non-solvable subgroup of $PL_0(I)$. We find mild conditions under which other non-solvable subgroups ($B$, $(\wr\Z\wr)^{\infty}$, $(\Z\wr)^{\infty}$, and $^{\infty}(\wr\Z)$) embed in subgroups of $PL_0(I)$. We show that all solvable subgroups of $PL_0(I)$ embed in all non-solvable subgroups of $PL_0(I)$. These results continue to apply if …
This paper allows one to obtain a criterion for the existence of a projectively invariant measure formulated in terms of combinatorial properties of a group (amenability of some canonical quotient group). Such necessary and sufficient condition is a basis of the classification scheme for groups of homeomorphisms of the line. In particular, a nonamenability of Thompson's group $F$ follows from the obtained criterion.
For the class of solvable groups of homeomorphisms of the line preserving orientation and containing a freely acting element, we establish the metabelianity of the quotient group $G/H_G$, where the elements of the normal subgroup $H_G$ are stabilizers of the minimal set. This fact is an important element in the classification theorem, used, in particular, in the study of the Thompson's group $F$.
We produce two separate algebraic descriptions of the isomorphism classes of the solvable subgroups of the group PLo(I) of piecewise-linear orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of the unit interval under the operation of composition, and also of the solvable subgroups of the generalized R. Thompson groups F_n. The first description is as a set of isomorphism classes of groups which is closed under three algebraic operations, and the second is as the set of isomorphism classes of subgroups of a countable collection of easily described groups. We show the two descriptions are equivalent.
We investigate subgroups of the group PLo(I) of piecewise-linear, orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of the unit interval with finitely many breaks in slope, under the operation of composition, and also subgroups of the generalized Thompson groups F_n. We find geometric criteria determining the derived length of any such group, and use this criteria to produce a geometric classification of the solvable and non-solvable subgroups of PLo(I) and of the F_n. We also show that any standard restricted wreath product C wr T (of non-trivial groups) that embeds in PLo(I) or F_n must have T isomorphi…
Ghys and Sergiescu proved in the $80$s that Thompson's group $T$, and hence $F$, admits actions by $C^{\infty}$ diffeomorphisms of the circle . They proved that the standard actions of these groups are topologically conjugate to a group of $C^\infty$ diffeomorphisms. Monod defined a family of groups of piecewise projective homeomorphisms, and Lodha-Moore defined finitely presentable groups of piecewise projective homeomorphisms. These groups are of particular interest because they are nonamenable and contain no free subgroup. In contrast to the result of Ghys-Sergiescu, we prove that the group…
A generalization of the double commutator lemma for normal subgroups is shown for invariant random subgroups of a countable group acting faithfully on a Hausdorff space. As an application, we classify ergodic invariant random subgroups of topological full groups of Cantor minimal $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$-systems. Another corollary is that for an ergodic invariant random subgroup of a branch group, a.e. subgroup $H$ must contain derived subgroups of certain rigid stabilizers. Such results can be applied towards classification of invariant random subgroups of Grigorchuk groups.
We complete the program begun by Brin and Squier of characterising conjugacy in Thompson's group $F$ using the standard action of $F$ as a group of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the unit interval.
We study the uniformly recurrent subgroups of groups acting by homeomorphisms on a topological space. We prove a general result relating uniformly recurrent subgroups to rigid stabilizers of the action, and deduce a $C^*$-simplicity criterion based on the non-amenability of rigid stabilizers. As an application, we show that Thompson's group $V$ is $C^\ast$-simple, as well as groups of piecewise projective homeomorphisms of the real line. This provides examples of finitely presented $C^\ast$-simple groups without free subgroups. We prove that a branch group is either amenable or $C^\ast$-simple…
We show that the abstract commensurator of Thompson's group F is composed of four building blocks: two isomorphism types of simple groups, the multiplicative group of the positive rationals and a cyclic group of order two. The main result establishes the simplicity of a certain group of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the real line.
Let T denote Thompson's group of piecewise 2-adic linear homeomorphisms of the circle. Ghys and Sergiescu showed that the rotation number of every element of T is rational, but their proof is very indirect. We give here a short, direct proof using train tracks, which generalizes to PL homeomorphism of the circle with rational break points and derivatives which are powers of some fixed integer, and also to certain flows on surfaces which we call "Thompson-like". We also obtain an explicit upper bound on the smallest period of a fixed point in terms of data which can be read off from the combina…
The automorphism groups of several of Thompson's countable groups of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the line and circle are computed and it is shown that the outer automorphism groups of these groups are relatively small. These results can be interpreted as stability results for certain structures of PL functions on the circle. Machinery is developed to relate the structures on the circle to corresponding structures on the line.
For every finitely generated free group we construct an explicit left order extending the lexicographic order on the free monoid generated by the positive letters. The order is defined by a left, free action on the orbit of 0 of a free group of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the line. The membership in the positive cone is decidable in linear time in the length of the input word. The positive cone forms a context-free language closed under word reversal.
We determine the abstract commensurator com(F) of Thompson's group F and describe it in terms of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the real line and in terms of tree pair diagrams. We show com (F) is not finitely generated and determine which subgroups of finite index in F are isomorphic to F. We show that the natural map from the commensurator group to the quasi-isometry group of F is injective.
We study the properties of rotation numbers for some groups of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the circle. We use these properties to obtain results on PL rigidity, non isomorphicity, non exoticity of automorphisms, non smoothability for Thompson-Stein groups.
We construct `structure invariants' of a one-ended, finitely presented group that describe the way in which the factors of its JSJ decomposition over two-ended subgroups fit together. For groups satisfying two technical conditions, these invariants reduce the problem of quasi-isometry classification of such groups to the problem of relative quasi-isometry classification of the factors of their JSJ decompositions. The first condition is that their JSJ decompositions have two-ended cylinder stabilizers. The second is that every factor in their JSJ decompositions is either `relatively rigid' or `…
In this partly expository paper, we study the set A of groups of orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of the circle S^1 which do not admit non-abelian free subgroups. We use classical results about homeomorphisms of the circle and elementary dynamical methods to derive various new and old results about the groups in A. Of the known results, we include some results from a family of results of Beklaryan and Malyutin, and we also give a new proof of a theorem of Margulis. Our primary new results include a detailed classification of the solvable subgroups of R. Thompson's group T .
Thompson's group F is the group of all increasing dyadic piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the closed unit interval. We compute Sigma^m(F) and Sigma^m(F;Z), the homotopical and homological Bieri-Neumann-Strebel-Renz invariants of F, and we show that Sigma^m(F) = Sigma^m(F;Z). As an application, we show that, for every m, F has subgroups of type F_{m-1} which are not of type F_{m}.
In a recent paper, we showed that groups admitting "veelike actions" on a finite language embed in mapping class groups of certain two-sided subshifts. In this note, we illustrate this theorem for the embedding of Thompson's $V$ by exhibiting the piecewise linear local rules for the embedding. These turn out to split the embedding into the mapping class group, showing that $V$ even embeds in the mapping class group by homeomorphisms.
