We study the topological structure and the topological dynamics of groups of homeomorphisms of scattered spaces. For a large class of them (including the homeomorphism group of any ordinal space or of any locally compact scattered space), we establish Roelcke-precompactness and amenability, classify all closed normal subgroups and compute the universal minimal flow. As a by-product, we classify up to isomorphism the homeomorphism groups of compact ordinal spaces.
We show that the topology of pointwise convergence on scattered spaces is compatible with the group structure of their homeomorphism group. We then establish a few topological properties of the homeomorphism group of the first uncountable ordinal, such as amenability and Roelcke-precompactness.
The set of all closed subgroups of a profinite carries a natural profinite topology. This space of subgroups can be classified up to homeomorphism in many cases, and tight bounds placed on its complexity as expressed by its scattered height.
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 …
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 prove that no subgroup of the group of boundary-fixing homeomorphisms of a compact surface whose action on the interior of the surface is sufficiently transitive can be Roelcke precompact with the topology inherited from the compact-open topology.
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…
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…
In this paper we focus on the set-open topologies on the group $\mathcal{H}(X)$ of all self-homeomorphisms of a topological space $X$ which yield continuity of both the group operations, product and inverse function. As a consequence, we make the more general case of Dijkstra's theorem. In this case a homogeneously encircling family $\mathcal{B}$ consists of regular open sets and the closure of every set from $\mathcal{B}$ is contained in the finite union of connected sets from $\mathcal{B}$. Also we proved that the zero-cozero topology of $\mathcal{H}(X)$ is the relativisation to $\mathcal{H}…
We prove that for any non-compact connected surface $M$ the group $H_c(M)$ of compactly suported homeomorphisms of $M$ endowed with the Whitney topology is homeomorphic to $R^\infty\times l_2$ or $Z\times R^\infty\times l_2$.
I survey the known results about the invariant Sigma 1 of groups of PL-homeomorphisms of a compact interval and supplement them with new results about Sigma 1 of PL-homeomorphism groups of a half line or a line. The proofs are based on the Cayley-graph definition of the invariant.
A group $G$ is said to be periodic if for any $g\in G$ there exists a positive integer $n$ with $g^n=id$. We prove that a finitely generated periodic group of homeomorphisms on the 2-torus that preserves a measure $μ$ is finite. Moreover if the group consists in homeomorphisms isotopic to the identity, then it is abelian and acts freely on $\mathbb{T}^2$. In the Appendix, we show that every finitely generated 2-group of toral homeomorphisms is finite.
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…
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.
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 construct examples of finitely generated infinite simple groups of homeomorphisms of the real line. Equivalently, these are examples of finitely generated simple left (or right) orderable groups. This answers a well known open question of Rhemtulla from 1980 concerning the existence of such groups. In fact, our construction provides a family of continuum many isomorphism types of groups with these properties.
We show that any homomorphism from the homeomorphism group of a compact 2-manifold, with the compact-open topology, or equivalently, with the topology of uniform convergence, into a separable topological group is automatically continuous.
Given a transitive permutation group, a fundamental object for studying its higher transitivity properties is the permutation action of its isotropy subgroup. We reverse this relationship and introduce a universal construction of infinite permutation groups that takes as input a given system of imprimitivity for its isotropy subgroup. This produces vast families kaleidoscopic groups. We investigate their algebraic properties, such as simplicity and oligomorphy; their homological properties, such as acyclicity or contrariwise large Schur multipliers; their topological properties, such as unique…
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.
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 show that several classes of groups G of PL-homeomorphisms of the real line admit non-trivial homomorphisms from G to the additive group of reals that are fixed by every automorphism of G. The classes of groups enjoying the stated property include the generalisations of Thompson's group F studied by K. S. Brown, M. Stein, S. Cleary, and Bieri-Strebel but also the class of groups investigated by Bieri-Neumann-Strebel in [BNS87, Theorem 8.1]. It follows that every automorphism of a group in one of these classes has infinitely many associated twisted conjugacy classes.
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.
We prove that every finitely-generated group of homeomorphisms of the 2-dimensional sphere all of whose elements have a finite order which is a power of 2 and so that there exists a uniform bound for the order of group elements is finite. We prove a similar result for groups of area-preserving homeomorphisms without the hypothesis that the orders of group elements are powers of 2 provided there is an element of even order.
The goal of this article is to exhibit two new families of finitely generated simple groups of homeomorphisms of $\mathbf{R}$. These families are strikingly different from existing families owing to the nature of their actions on $\mathbf{R}$, and exhibit surprising algebraic and dynamical features. In particular, one construction provides the first examples of finitely generated simple groups of homeomorphisms of the real line which also admit a minimal action by homeomorphisms on the circle. This provides new examples of finitely generated simple groups with infinite commutator width, and th…
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…
In this paper, we present a simple proof of the fact that any compact subgroup of homeomorphisms of the 2-sphere is topologically conjugate to a closed subgroup of the orthogonal group O(3).
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.
We study algebraic properties of groups of PL or smooth homeomorphisms of unit cubes in any dimension, fixed pointwise on the boundary, and more generally PL or smooth groups acting on manifolds and fixing pointwise a submanifold of codimension 1 (resp. codimension 2), and show that such groups are locally indicable (resp. circularly orderable). We also give many examples of interesting groups that can act, and discuss some other algebraic constraints that such groups must satisfy, including the fact that a group of PL homeomorphisms of the n-cube (fixed pointwise on the boundary) contains no …
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.
We continue to study topological properties of the group Homeo(X) of all homeomorphisms of a Cantor set X with respect to the uniform topology tau, which was started in the paper (S. Bezuglyi, A.H. Dooley, and J. Kwiatkowski, Topologies on the group of homeomorphisms of a Cantor set, ArXiv e-print math.DS/0410507, 2004). We prove that the set of periodic homeomorphisms is tau-dense in Homeo(X) and deduce from this result that the topological group (Homeo(X), tau) has the Rokhlin property, i.e., there exists a homeomorphism whose conjugate class is tau-dense in Homeo(X). We also show that for a…
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.
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 homeomor…
In this paper, we investigate an equivariant homeomorphism of the boundaries $\partial X$ and $\partial Y$ of two proper CAT(0) spaces $X$ and $Y$ on which a CAT(0) group $G$ acts geometrically. We provide a sufficient condition to obtain a $G$-equivariant homeomorphism of the two boundaries $\partial X$ and $\partial Y$ as a continuous extension of the quasi-isometry $ϕ:Gx_0\to Gy_0$ defined by $ϕ(gx_0)=gy_0$, where $x_0\in X$ and $y_0\in Y$.
Let M be a compact manifold. We show the identity component $\mathrm{Homeo}_0(M)$ of the group of self-homeomorphisms of M has a well-defined quasi-isometry type, and study its large scale geometry. Through examples, we relate this large scale geometry to both the topology of M and the dynamics of group actions on M. This gives a rich family of examples of non-locally compact groups to which one can apply the large-scale methods developed in previous work of the second author.
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.
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.
We show that for any full and sufficiently transitive (i.e. \textit{flexible}) group $G$ of homeomorphisms of Cantor space, $\mathrm{Aut}(\mathrm{Aut}(G)) = \mathrm{Aut}(G)$. This class contains many generalisations of the Higman-Thompson groups $G_{n,r}$, and the Rational group $\mathcal{R}_{2}$ of Grigorchuk, Nekrashevych, and Suchanski{\u ı}. We also demonstrate that for generalisations $T_{n,r}$ of R. Thompson's group $T$, $\mathrm{Aut}(\mathrm{Aut}(T_{n,r}))= \mathrm{Aut}(T_{n,r})$. In the case of the groups $G_{n,r}$ and $T_{n,r}$ our results extend results of Brin and Guzm{\' a}n for Th…
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 .
We adapt the Ping-Pong Lemma, which historically was used to study free products of groups, to the setting of the homeomorphism group of the unit interval. As a consequence, we isolate a large class of generating sets for subgroups of $\mathrm{Homeo}_+(I)$ for which certain finite dynamical data can be used to determine the marked isomorphism type of the groups which they generate. As a corollary, we will obtain a criteria for embedding subgroups of $\mathrm{Homeo}_+(I)$ into Richard Thompson's group $F$. In particular, every member of our class of generating sets generates a group which embed…
We study the group of almost-periodic homeomorphisms of the real line. Our main result states that an action of a finitely generated group on the real line without global fixed point is conjugated to an almost-periodic action without almost fixed point. This is equivalent to saying that the action on the real line can be compactified to an action on a 1-dimensional lamination of a compact space, without global fixed point. As an application we give an alternative proof of Witte's theorem: an amenable left orderable group is locally indicable.
We show that the topological groups $Diff_{+}^{1}(I)$ and $Diff_{+}^{1}(\mathbb{S}^1)$ of orientation-preserving $C^1$-diffeomorphisms of the interval and the circle, respectively, admit finitely generated dense subgroups. We also investigate the question of genericity (in the sense of Baire category) of such finite topological generating sets in related groups. We show that the generic pair of elements in the homeomorphism group $Homeo_+(I)$ generate a dense subgroup of $Homeo_+(I)$. By contrast, if $M$ is any compact connected manifold with boundary other than the interval, we observe that a…
Let X be a path-connected topological space admitting a universal cover. Let Homeo(X,a) denote the group of homeomorphisms of X preserving degree one cohomology class a. We investigate the distortion in Homeo(X,a). Let g be an element of Homeo(X,a). We define a Nielsen-type equivalence relation on the space of g-invariant Borel probability measures on X and prove that if a homeomorphism g admits two nonequivalent invariant measures then it is undistorted. We also define a local rotation number of a homeomorphism generalising the notion of the rotation of a homeomorphism of the circle. Then we …
