We study growth of 1-cocycles of locally compact groups, with values in unitary representations. Discussing the existence of 1-cocycles with linear growth, we obtain the following alternative for a class of amenable groups G containing polycyclic groups and connected amenable Lie groups: either G has no quasi-isometric embedding into Hilbert space, or G admits a proper cocompact action on some Euclidean space.
On the other hand, noting that almost coboundaries (i.e. 1-cocycles approximable by bounded 1-cocycles) have sublinear growth, we discuss the converse, which turns out to hold for amenable groups with "controlled" Folner sequences; for general amenable groups we prove the weaker result that 1-cocycles with sufficiently small growth are almost coboundaries. Besides, we show that there exist, on a-T-menable groups, proper cocycles with arbitrary small growth.
Let $G$ be a compactly generated locally compact group and $(π, \mathcal H)$ a unitary representation of $G.$ The $1$-cocycles with coefficients in $π$ which are harmonic (with respect to a suitable probability measure on $G$) represent classes in the first reduced cohomology $\bar{H}^1(G,π).$ We show that harmonic $1$-cocycles are characterized inside their reduced cohomology class by the fact that they span a minimal closed subspace of $\mathcal H.$ In particular, the affine isometric action given by a harmonic cocycle $b$ is irreducible (in the sense that $\mathcal H$ contains no non-empty,…
Our main result is that a finitely generated nilpotent group has no isometric action on an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space with dense orbits. In contrast, we construct such an action with a finitely generated metabelian group.
We show that every non-elementary hyperbolic group $\G$ admits a proper affine isometric action on $L^p(\bd\G\times \bd\G)$, where $\bd\G$ denotes the boundary of $\G$ and $p$ is large enough. Our construction involves a $\G$-invariant measure on $\bd\G\times \bd\G$ analogous to the Bowen - Margulis measure from the CAT$(-1)$ setting, as well as a geometric cocycle à la Busemann. We also deduce that $\G$ admits a proper affine isometric action on the first $\ell^p$-cohomology group $H^1_{(p)}(\G)$ for large enough $p$.
We prove an analog for integrable measurable cocycles of Pansu's differentiation theorem for Lipschitz maps between Carnot-Carathéodory spaces. This yields an alternative, ergodic theoretic proof of Pansu's quasi-isometric rigidity theorem for nilpotent groups, answers a question of Tim Austin regarding integrable measure equivalence between nilpotent groups, and gives an independent proof and strengthening of Austin's result that integrable measure equivalent nilpotent groups have bi-Lipschitz asymptotic cones. Our main tools are a nilpotent-valued cocycle ergodic theorem and a Poincaré recur…
Answering a question by Chatterji--Druţu--Haglund, we prove that, for every locally compact group $G$, there exists a critical constant $p_G \in [0,\infty]$ such that $G$ admits a continuous affine isometric action on an $L_p$ space ($0<p<\infty$) with unbounded orbits if and only if $p \geq p_G$. A similar result holds for the existence of proper continuous affine isometric actions on $L_p$ spaces. Using a representation of cohomology by harmonic cocycles, we also show that such unbounded orbits cannot occure when the linear part comes from a measure preserving action, or more generally a sta…
We prove a new weak mean ergodic theorem (Theorem A) for 1-cocycles associated to weakly mixing representations of amenable groups. Let $G$ be a finitely generated, discrete, amenable group $G$ which admits a controlled Folner sequence. We use Theorem A to deduce that any affine action $G\ca^T \Cal H$ on Hilbert space with weakly mixing linear part admits a sequence of almost fixed points (Theorem B). Specializing to the case that $G$ is a finitely generated group of polynomial growth, we show that convex combinations of averages of the associated 1-cocycle over $n$-balls provide a sequence of…
The classical Gaussian functor associates to every orthogonal representation of a locally compact group $G$ a probability measure preserving action of $G$ called a Gaussian action. In this paper, we generalize this construction by associating to every affine isometric action of $G$ on a Hilbert space, a one-parameter family of nonsingular Gaussian actions whose ergodic properties are related in a very subtle way to the geometry of the original action. We show that these nonsingular Gaussian actions exhibit a phase transition phenomenon and we relate it to new quantitative invariants for affine…
We prove the $K$-theoretic Farrell-Jones conjecture for groups as in the title with coefficient rings and $C^*$-algebras which are stable with respect to compact operators. We use this and Higson-Kasparov's result that the Baum-Connes conjecture with coefficients holds for such groups, to show that if $G$ is as in the title then the algebraic and the $C^*$-crossed products of $G$ with a stable $C^*$-algebra have the same $K$-theory.
We show a structural property of cohomology with coefficients in an isometric representation on a uniformly convex Banach space: if the cohomology group $H^1(G,π)$ is reduced, then, up to an isomorphism, it is a closed complemented, subspace of the space of cocycles and its complement is the subspace of coboundaries.
We undertake a systematic study of irreducible affine isometric actions of locally compact groups on Hilbert spaces. It turns out that, while that are a few parallels of this study to the by now classical theory of irreducible unitary representations, these two theories differ in several aspects (for instance, the direct sum of two irreducible affine actions can still be irreducible). One of the main tools we use is an affine version of Schur's lemma characterizing the irreducibility of an affine isometric group action. This enables us to describe for instance the irreducible affine isometric …
If one tries to embed a metric space uniformly in Hilbert space, how close to quasi-isometric could the embedding be? We answer this question for finite dimensional CAT(0) cube complexes and for hyperbolic groups. In particular, we show that the Hilbert space compression of any hyperbolic group is 1.
A theorem of Delorme states that every unitary representation of a connected Lie group with nontrivial reduced first cohomology has a finite-dimensional subrepresentation. More recently Shalom showed that such a property is inherited by cocompact lattices and stable under coarse equivalence among amenable countable discrete groups. We give a new geometric proof of Delorme's theorem which extends to a larger class of groups, including solvable $p$-adic algebraic groups, and finitely generated solvable groups with finite Prüfer rank. Moreover all our results apply to isometric representations in…
We consider certain strengthenings of property (T) relative to Banach spaces that are satisfied by high rank Lie groups. Let X be a Banach space for which, for all k, the Banach--Mazur distance to a Hilbert space of all k-dimensional subspaces is bounded above by a power of k strictly less than one half. We prove that every connected simple Lie group of sufficiently large real rank depending on X has strong property (T) of Lafforgue with respect to X. As a consequence, we obtain that every continuous affine isometric action of such a high rank group (or a lattice in such a group) on X has a fi…
We revisit Sz.-Nagy's criteria for similarity of Hilbert space bounded linear operators to isometries or unitaries and present new ones. We also discuss counterparts of the Dixmier-Day theorem concerning bounded representations of amenable groups and semigroups. We highlight the role of Folner sets in similarity problems in both settings of unimodular, $σ$-compact, amenable groups and in discrete semigroups possessing the Strong Folner condition (SFC).
We investiguate a property of affine isometric actions on Hilbert spaces called evanescence. Evanescent actions are the extreme opposite of irreducible actions. Every affine isometric action decomposes naturally into an evanescent part and an irreducible part. We study when this decomposition is unique. We also study when an action that has almost fixed points is automatically evanescent. We relate these questions to the identity excluding property for groups. We also relate them to the finiteness of the von Neumann algebras generated by the linear part of the action.
We verify Shalom's conjecture for the simple real-rank-one Lie group Sp(n ,1) for any n: i.e. we show that it admits a metrically proper affine action on a Hilbert space whose linear part is a uniformly bounded representation. We provide two different proofs. Both approaches crucially use results on uniformly bounded representations by Michael Cowling. The first approach is quite abstract: it uses an automatic-properness result of Shalom and requires almost no computations. The second approach is explicit: we deduce the properness of cocycles from the non-continuity of a critical case of the S…
We show that every non-precompact topological group admits a fixed point-free continuous action by affine isometries on a suitable Banach space. Thus, precompact groups are defined by the fixed point property for affine isometric actions on Banach spaces. For separable topological groups, in the above statements it is enough to consider affine actions on one particular Banach space: the unique Banach space envelope of the universal Urysohn metric space, known as the Holmes space. At the same time, we show that Polish groups need not admit topologically proper (in particular, free) affine isome…
Let $Γ$ be a discrete group with property $(T)$ of Kazhdan. We prove that any Riemannian isometric action of $Γ$ on a compact manifold $X$ is locally rigid. We also prove a more general foliated version of this result. The foliated result is used in our proof of local rigidity for standard actions of higher rank semisimple Lie groups and their lattices in \cite{FM2}. One definition of property $(T)$ is that a group $Γ$ has property $(T)$ if every isometric $Γ$ action on a Hilbert space has a fixed point. We prove a variety of strengthenings of this fixed point properties for groups with proper…
We analyse volume-preserving actions of product groups on Riemannian manifolds. To this end, we establish a new superrigidity theorem for ergodic cocycles of product groups ranging in linear groups. There are no a priori assumptions on the acting groups, except a spectral gap assumption on their action. Our main application to manifolds concerns irreducible actions of Kazhdan product groups. We prove the following dichotomy: Either the action is infinitesimally linear, which means that the derivative cocycle arises from unbounded linear representations of all factors. Otherwise, the action is …
