We show that the topology of uniform convergence on bounded sets is compatible with the group law of the automorphism group of a large class of spaces that are endowed with both a uniform structure and a bornology, thus yielding numerous examples of topological groups. This encompasses many of previously known cases, such as homeomorphism groups of locally compact spaces, automorphism groups of first-order structures, general linear groups of normed spaces, automorphism groups of uniform spaces, etc. We also study the automorphism group of a topological group within this framework (generalizing previously known results on locally compact groups). As a particular outcome of this machinery, we show that the automorphism group of a Polish locally Roelcke-precompact group carries a natural Polish group topology.
We give a "limit-free formula" simplifying the computation of the topological entropy for topological automorphisms of totally disconnected locally compact groups. This result allows us to extend several basic properties of the topological entropy known to hold for compact groups.
We consider L^p-cohomology of reflexive Banach spaces and give a spectral condition implying the vanishing of 1-cohomology with coefficients in uniformly bounded representations on a Hilbert space.
We prove that if $G$ is a group of automorphisms of a regular locally finite building which is closed in the compact-open topology and acts Weyl transitively on the building, then $G$ admits just one Hausdorff locally compact $σ$-compact topology compatible with the group operations.
We investigate some situation in which automorphisms of a group G are uniquely determined by their restrictions to a proper subgroup H. Much of the paper is devoted to studying under which additional hypotheses this property forces G to be nilpotent if H is. As an application we prove that certain countably infinite locally nilpotent groups have uncountably many (outer) automorphisms.
We study contraction groups for automorphisms of totally disconnected locally compcat groups using the scale of the automorphism as a tool. The contraction group is shown to be unbounded when the inverse automorphism has non-trivial scale and this scale is shown to be the inverse value of the modular function on the closure of the contraction group at the automorphism. The closure of the contraction group is represented as acting on a homogenous tree and closed contraction groups are characterised.
We observe that there is an example of an automorphism group of a model of an omega-stable theory---in fact, the prime model of an uncountably-categorical theory---that is not locally (OB), answering a question of C. Rosendal.
We prove that the minimally displaced set of a relatively irreducible automorphism of a free splitting, situated in a deformation space, is uniformly locally finite. The minimally displaced set coincides with the train track points for an irreducible automorphism. We develop the theory in a general setting of deformation spaces of free products, having in mind the study of the action of reducible automorphisms of a free group on the simplicial bordification of Outer Space. For instance, a reducible automorphism will have invariant free factors, act on the corresponding stratum of the bordifica…
It is well known that every locally compact abelian group L can be decomposed as L_1 \oplus R^n, where L_1 contains a compact-open subgroup. In this paper, we use this decomposition to study the topological group Aut(L) of automorphisms of L, equipped with the g-topology. We show that Aut(L) is topologically isomorphic to a matrix group with entries from Aut(L_1), Hom(L_1, R^n), Hom(R^n, L_1), and GL_n(R), respectively. It is also shown that the algebraic portion of the decomposition is not specific to locally compact abelian groups, but is also true for objects with a well-behaved decompositi…
We show that any connected locally compact group which admits an expansive automorphism is nilpotent. We also show that for any locally compact group $G$, $α\in {\rm Aut}(G)$ is expansive if and only if for any $α$-invariant closed subgroup $H$ which is either compact or normal, the restriction of $α$ to $H$ is expansive and the quotient map on $G/H$ corresponding to $α$ is expansive. We get a structure theorem for locally compact groups admitting expansive automorphisms. We prove that an automorphism on a non-discrete locally compact group can not be both distal and expansive.
To any automorphism, $α$, of a totally disconnected, locally compact group, $G$, there is associated a compact, $α$-stable subgroup of $G$, here called the \emph{nub} of $α$, on which the action of $α$ is topologically transitive. Topologically transitive actions of automorphisms of compact groups have been studied extensively in topological dynamics and results obtained transfer, via the nub, to the study of automorphisms of general locally compact groups. A new proof that the contraction group of $α$ is dense in the nub is given, but it is seen that the two-sided contraction group need not b…
We study the group $IAut(A)$ generated by the inertial automorphisms of an abelian group $A$, that is, automorphisms $γ$ with the property that each subgroup $H$ of $A$ has finite index in the subgroup generated by $H$ and $Hγ$. Clearly, $IAut(A)$ contains the group $FAut(A)$ of finitary automorphisms of $A$, which is known to be locally finite. In a previous paper, we showed that $IAut(A)$ is (locally finite)-by-abelian. In this paper, we show that $IAut(A)$ is also metabelian-by-(locally finite). In particular, $IAut(A)$ has a normal subgroup $Γ$ such that $IAut(A)/Γ$ is locally finite and $…
In this article we study automorphisms and endomorphisms of lacunary hyperbolic groups. We prove that every lacunary hyperbolic group is Hopfian, answering a question by Henry Wilton. In addition, we show that if a lacunary hyperbolic group has the fix point property for actions on $\mathbf R$-trees, then it is co-Hopfian and its outer automorphism group is locally finite. We also construct lacunary hyperbolic groups whose automorphism group is infinite, locally finite, and contains any locally finite group given in advance.
We show that the group of type-preserving automorphisms of any irreducible semi-regular thick right-angled building is abstractly simple. When the building is locally finite, this gives a large family of compactly generated (abstractly) simple locally compact groups. Specializing to appropriate cases, we obtain examples of such simple groups that are locally indecomposable, but have locally normal subgroups decomposing non-trivially as direct products.
Automorphism groups of locally finite trees provide a large class of examples of simple totally disconnected locally compact groups. It is desirable to understand the connections between the global and local structure of such a group. Topologically, the local structure is given by the commensurability class of a vertex stabiliser; on the other hand, the action on the tree suggests that the local structure should correspond to the local action of a stabiliser of a vertex on its neighbours. We study the interplay between these different aspects for the special class of groups satisfying Tits' in…
Following Plotkin we say that the automorphism $x$ of the group $G$ is a nil-automorphism if, for every $g\in G$, there exists $n=n(g)$ such that $[g,_n x]=1$. If the integer $n$ can be chosen independently of $g$, then $x$ is said to be unipotent. Nil and unipotent automorphisms can be regarded as a natural extension of the concept of Engel element, since a nil-automorphism $x$ is just a left-Engel element in $G < x >$. In this paper we consider nil-automorphisms of groups with residual properties namely locally-graded groups, residually-finite groups and profinite groups. The first result we…
This is the first of a three parts paper providing full details for our previous announcement in Prépublications Orsay 2007-16, arXiv:0711.3579. Here we prove the results stated in the title.
We verify a conjecture of Vershik by showing that Hall's universal countable locally finite group can be embedded as a dense subgroup in the isometry group of the Urysohn space and in the automorphism group of the random graph. In fact, we show the same for all automorphism groups of known infinite ultraextensive spaces. These include, in addition, the isometry group of the rational Urysohn space, the isometry group of the ultrametric Urysohn spaces, and the automorphism group of the universal $K_n$-free graph for all $n\geq 3$. Furthermore, we show that finite group actions on finite metric s…
We prove that numerous negatively curved simply connected locally compact polyhedral complexes, admitting a discrete cocompact group of automorphisms, have automorphism groups which are locally compact, uncountable, non linear and virtually simple. Examples include hyperbolic buildings, Cayley graphs of word hyperbolic Coxeter systems, and generalizations of cubical complexes, that we call even polyhedral complexes. We use tools introduced by Tits in the case of automorphism groups of trees, and Davis-Moussong's geometric realisation of Coxeter systems.
We study automorphisms $α$ of a totally disconnected, locally compact group $G$ which are expansive in the sense that, for some identity neighbourhood $U$, the sets $α^n(U)$ (for integers $n$) intersect in the trivial group. Notably, we prove that the automorphism induced by $α$ on $G/N$ for an $α$-stable closed normal subgroup $N$ of $G$ is always expansive. Further results involve the associated contraction groups $U_α$ consisting of all $x$ in $G$ such that $α^n(x) \to e$ as $n$ tends to infinity. If $α$ is expansive, then $W := U_αU_{α^{-1}}$ is an open identity neighbourhood in $G$. We gi…
The main result of the paper is the following theorem. Let $q$ be a prime and $A$ an elementary abelian group of order $q^3$. Suppose that $A$ acts coprimely on a profinite group $G$ and assume that $C_G(a)$ is locally nilpotent for each $a\in A^{\#}$. Then the group $G$ is locally nilpotent.
For a locally compact metrizable group $G$, we consider the action of ${\rm Aut}(G)$ on ${\rm Sub}_G$, the space of all closed subgroups of $G$ endowed with the Chabauty topology. We study the structure of groups $G$ admitting automorphisms $T$ which act expansively on ${\rm Sub}_G$. We show that such a group $G$ is necessarily totally disconnected, $T$ is expansive and that the contraction groups of $T$ and $T^{-1}$ are closed and their product is open in $G$; moreover, if $G$ is compact, then $G$ is finite. We also obtain the structure of the contraction group of such $T$. For the class of g…
We show that recent results of U. Baumgartner and G.A. Willis concerning contraction groups of automorphisms of metrizable, totally disconnected, locally compact groups remain valid also in the non-metrizable case, if one restricts attention to automorphisms for which small tidy subgroups exist.
Many non-locally compact second countable groups admit a comeagre conjugacy class. For example, this is the case for the automorphism group of the rational order and the automorphism group of the random graph [Truss]. A. Kechris and C. Rosendal ask if a non-trivial locally compact second countable group can admit a comeagre conjugacy class. We answer the question in the negative via an analysis of locally compact second countable groups with topological conditions on a conjugacy class.
If H is a flat group of automorphisms of finite rank n of a totally disconnected, locally compact group G, then each orbit of H in the metric space B(G) of compact, open subgroups of G is quasi-isometric to n-dimensional euclidean space. In this note we prove the following partial converse: Assume that G is a totally disconnected, locally compact group such that B(G) is a proper metric space and let H be a group of automorphisms of G such that some (equivalently every) orbit of H in B(G) is quasi-isometric to n-dimensional euclidean space, then H has a finite index subgroup which is flat of ra…
We prove a purely topological characterization of the Moufang property for disconnected compact polygons in terms of convergence groups. As a consequence, we recover the fact that a locally finite thick affine building of rank 3 is a Bruhat-Tits building if and only if its automorphism group is strongly transitive. We also study automorphism groups of general compact polygons without any homogeneity assumption. A compactness criterion for sets of automorphisms is established, generalizing the theorem by Burns and Spatzier that the full automorphism group, endowed with the compact-open topology…
Let $q$ be a prime and $A$ an elementary abelian $q$-group acting as a coprime group of automorphisms on a profinite group $G$. We show that if $A$ is of order $q^2$ and some power of each element in $C_G(a)$ is Engel in $G$ for any $a\in A^{\#}$, then $G$ is locally virtually nilpotent. Assuming that $A$ is of order $q^3$ we prove that if some power of each element in $C_G(a)$ is Engel in $C_G(a)$ for any $a\in A^{\#}$, then $G$ is locally virtually nilpotent. Some analogues consequences of quantitative nature for finite groups are also obtained.
The concepts of the scale and tidy subgroups for an automorphism of a totally disconnected locally compact group were defined in seminal work by George A. Willis in the 1990s, and recently generalized to the case of endomorphisms (G. A. Willis, Math. Ann. 361 (2015), 403--442). We show that central facts concerning the scale, tidy subgroups, quotients, and contraction groups of automorphisms extend to the case of endomorphisms. In particular, we obtain results concerning the domain of attraction around an invariant closed subgroup.
We obtain sufficient and necessary conditions for the Choquet-Deny theorem to hold in the class of compactly generated totally disconnected locally compact groups of polynomial growth, and in a larger class of totally disconnected generalized $\ov{FC}$-groups. The following conditions turn out to be equivalent when $G$ is a metrizable compactly generated totally disconnected locally compact group of polynomial growth: (i) the Choquet-Deny theorem holds for $G$; (ii) the group of inner automorphisms of $G$ acts distally on $G$; (iii) every inner automorphism of $G$ is distal; (iv) the contracti…
Let $T$ be a locally finite tree all of whose vertices have valency at least $6$. We classify, up to isomorphism, the closed subgroups of $\mathrm{Aut}(T)$ acting $2$-transitively on the set of ends of $T$ and whose local action at each vertex contains the alternating group. The outcome of the classification for a fixed tree $T$ is a countable family of groups, all containing two remarkable subgroups: a simple subgroup of index $\leq 8$ and (the semiregular analog of) the universal locally alternating group of Burger-Mozes (with possibly infinite index). We also provide an explicit example sho…
An element $g$ of a group $G$ is said to be right Engel if for every $x\in G$ there is a number $n=n(g,x)$ such that $[g,{}_{n}x]=1$. We prove that if a profinite group $G$ admits a coprime automorphism $φ$ of prime order such that every fixed point of $φ$ is a right Engel element, then $G$ is locally nilpotent.
We introduce the notion of the $k$-closure of a group of automorphisms of a locally finite tree, and give several examples of the construction. We show that the $k$-closure satisfies a new property of automorphism groups of trees that generalises Tits' Property $P$. We prove that, apart from some degenerate cases, any non-discrete group acting on a tree with this property contains an abstractly simple subgroup.
We introduce a quantitative characterization of subgroup alternatives modeled on the Tits alternative in terms of group laws and investigate when this property is preserved under extensions. We develop a framework that lets us expand the classes of groups known to have locally uniform exponential growth to include extensions of either word hyperbolic or right-angled Artin groups by groups with locally uniform exponential growth. From this, we deduce that the automorphism group of a torsion-free one-ended hyperbolic group has locally uniform exponential growth. Our methods also demonstrate that…
We prove that the family of all connected n-dimensional real Lie groups is uniformly Jordan for every n. This implies that all algebraic groups (not necessarily affine) over fields of characteristic zero and some transformation groups of complex spaces and Riemannian manifods are Jordan.
We consider the actions of (semi)groups on a locally compact group by automorphisms. We show the equivalence of distality and pointwise distality for the actions of a certain class of groups. We also show that a compactly generated locally compact group of polynomial growth has a compact normal subgroup $K$ such that $G/K$ is distal and the conjugacy action of $G$ on $K$ is ergodic; moreover, if $G$ itself is (pointwise) distal then $G$ is Lie projective. We prove a decomposition theorem for contraction groups of an automorphism under certain conditions. We give a necessary and sufficient cond…
Using the notion of a strongly regular hyperbolic automorphism of a locally finite Euclidean building, we prove that any (not necessarily discrete) closed, co-compact subgroup of the type-preserving automorphisms group of a locally finite general non-spherical building contains a compact-by-Z^d subgroup, where d is the dimension of a maximal flat.
An asymmetric coloring of a graph is a coloring of its vertices that is not preserved by any non-identity automorphism of the graph. The motion of a graph is the minimal degree of its automorphism group, i.e., the minimum number of elements displaced by any non-identity automorphism. In this paper we confirm Tom Tucker's "Infinite Motion Conjecture" that connected locally finite graphs with infinite motion admit an asymmetric 2-coloring. We infer this from the more general result that the inverse limit of a sequence of finite permutation groups with disjoint domains, viewed as a permutation gr…
In this work we characterise Cayley graphs of Coxeter groups with respect to the standard generating set that admit uncountable vertex stabilisers. As a corollary, we fully identify finitely generated Coxeter groups for which the automorphism group of their Cayley graph with respect to the standard generating set is not discrete when equipped with the permutation topology. As an application, we also provide new explicit constructions of vertex-transitive graphs of infinite degree that have locally compact automorphism groups.
A scale-multiplicative semigroup in a totally disconnected, locally compact group $G$ is one for which the restriction of the scale function on $G$ is multiplicative. The maximal scale-multiplicative semigroups in groups acting 2-transitively on the set of ends of trees without leaves are determined in this paper and shown to correspond to geometric features of the tree.
We prove that the tree almost automorphism groups admit exactly three commensurability classes of closed commensurated subgroups. Our proof utilizes an independently interesting characterization of subgroups of the tree almost automorphism groups which contain only periodic elements in terms of the dynamics of the action on the boundary of the tree. Our results further cover several interesting finitely generated subgroups of the tree almost automorphism groups, including the Thompson groups $F$, $T$, and $V$. We show in particular that Thompson's group $T$ has no commensurated subgroups other…
We show that the automorphism group of Philip Hall's universal locally finite group has ample generics,that is, it admits comeager diagonal conjugacy classes in all dimensions.Consequently, it has the small index property, is not the union of a countable chain of non-open subgroups, and has the automatic continuity property. Also, we discuss some algebraic and topological properties of the automorphism group of Hall universal group. For example, we show that every generic automorphism of Hall universal group is conjugate to all of its powers, and hence has roots of all orders.
Inspired by Ol'shanskii's work, we provide an axiomatic framework to describe certain irreducible unitary representations of non-discrete unimodular totally disconnected locally compact groups. We then look at the applications to certain groups of automorphisms of locally finite trees and semi-regular right-angled buildings.
We give a complete characterization of the locally compact groups that are non-elementary Gromov-hyperbolic and amenable. They coincide with the class of mapping tori of discrete or continuous one-parameter groups of compacting automorphisms. We moreover give a description of all Gromov-hyperbolic locally compact groups with a cocompact amenable subgroup: modulo a compact normal subgroup, these turn out to be either rank one simple Lie groups, or automorphism groups of semi-regular trees acting doubly transitively on the set of ends. As an application, we show that the class of hyperbolic loca…
To each totally disconnected, locally compact topological group G and each group A of automorphisms of G, a pseudo-metric space of ``directions'' has been associated by U. Baumgartner and the second author. Given a Lie group G over a local field, it is a natural idea to try to define a map from the space of directions of analytic automorphisms of G to the space of directions of automorphisms of the Lie algebra L(G) of G, which takes the direction of an analytic automorphism of G to the direction of the associated Lie algebra automorphism. We show that, in general, this map is not well-defined.…
The flat rank of a totally disconnected locally compact group G, denoted flat-rk(G), is an invariant of the topological group structure of G. It is defined thanks to a natural distance on the space of compact open subgroups of G. For a topological Kac-Moody group G with Weyl group W, we derive the inequalities: alg-rk(W)\le flat-rk(G)\le rk(|W|\_0). Here, alg-rk(W) is the maximal $\mathbb{Z}$-rank of abelian subgroups of W, and rk(|W|\_0) is the maximal dimension of isometrically embedded flats in the CAT0-realization |W|\_0. We can prove these inequalities under weaker assumptions. We also sh…
We study lattice embeddings for the class of countable groups $Γ$ defined by the property that the largest amenable uniformly recurrent subgroup $A_Γ$ is continuous. When $A_Γ$ comes from an extremely proximal action and the envelope of $A_Γ$ is co-amenable in $Γ$, we obtain restrictions on the locally compact groups $G$ that contain a copy of $Γ$ as a lattice, notably regarding normal subgroups of $G$, product decompositions of $G$, and more generally dense mappings from $G$ to a product of locally compact groups.
We show that the subgroup generated by locally finite polynomial automorphisms of k^n is normal in GA_n. Also, some properties of normal subgroups of GA_n containing all diagonal automorphisms are given.
We prove that a saturated weakly branch group $G$ has the property $R_\infty$ (any automorphism $ϕ:G\to G$ has infinite Reidemeister number) in each of the following cases: 1) any element of $Out(G)$ has finite order; 2) for any $ϕ$ the number of orbits on levels of the tree automorphism $t$ inducing $ϕ$ is uniformly bounded and $G$ is weakly stabilizer transitive; 3) $G$ is finitely generated, prime-branching, and weakly stabilizer transitive with some non-abelian stabilizers (with no restrictions on automorphisms). Some related facts and generalizations are proved.
By the Heyde theorem, the Gaussian distribution on the real line is characterized by the symmetry of the conditional distribution of one linear form of of $n$ independent random variables given another. When $n=2$ we prove analogues of this theorem in the case when independent random variables take values in a locally compact Abelian group $X$ and coefficients of the linear forms are topological automorphisms of $X$.
We answer in the negative a question of Hartley about representations of finite groups, by constructing examples of finite simple groups with arbitrarily large representations whose endomorphism ring consists of just the scalars. We show as a consequence that there are finite simple groups of automorphisms of the locally finite simple group $SL(\infty,\mathbb{F}_q)$ with trivial centraliser. The smallest of our examples is $A_6$ with $q=9$.
We characterize those Lie groups, and algebraic groups over a local field of characteristic zero, whose first reduced L^p-cohomology is zero for all p>1, extending a result of Pansu. As an application, we obtain a description of Gromov-hyperbolic groups among those groups. In particular we prove that any non-elementary Gromov-hyperbolic algebraic group over a non-Archimedean local field of zero characteristic is quasi-isometric to a 3-regular tree. We also extend the study to semidirect products of a general locally compact group by a cyclic group acting by contracting automorphisms.
