The variety of group actions on all algebraic real hyperbolic spaces
Abstract
For a cardinal , denote by the algebraic real hyperbolic space of dimension . For a topological group , we study the set of continuous representations up to continuous self-representations . The novelty of this work relies in considering simultaneously all cardinals, finite or infinite. We will endow this set of classes of representations with a natural topology, and show that this character variety is compact. This will also enable us to recover all previous compactifications of actions on by certain actions on real trees for the equivariant Gromov-Hausdorff topology. A class of representations recovers in particular the homothety class of its marked length spectrum. We will define the notion of algebraic cross-ratio and prove a GNS-embedding result, enabling us to generalize some rigidity properties of the marked length spectrum. We will also introduce a notion of abstract cross-ratio, and use it to show that a wide class of groups (characterized by the existence of what we call a -full action on a -space) admit at most one class of irreducible representations into whose boundedness properties are controlled by those of . We will apply this to topological groups such as the isometry group itself, the automorphism group of the simplicial tree with countably infinite valency, and the automorphism group of the projective line over a non-Archimedean field.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.03863,
title = {The variety of group actions on all algebraic real hyperbolic spaces},
author = {Bruno Duchesne and Christopher-Lloyd Simon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.03863},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
73 pages, 2 figures. Keywords: strong hyperbolicity, $\operatorname{CAT}(-1)$-space, Ptolemaic metric, cross-ratio, kernel of hyperbolic type, M\"obius group, exotic representations, character variety, marked length spectrum, cross-ratio, rigidity, Polish group, Gromov-Hausdorff convergence