Related papers: Groups not acting on manifolds

We prove that a group $\Gamma$ admits a discrete topological (equivalently, smooth) action on some simply-connected 3-manifold if and only if $\Gamma$ has a Cayley complex embeddable -- with certain natural restrictions -- in one of the…

Deformation spaces Hom($\pi$,G)/G of representations of the fundamental group $\pi$ of a surface $\Sigma$ in a Lie group $G$ admit natural actions of the mapping class group $Mod_\Sigma$, preserving a Poisson structure. When $G$ is compact,…

We show that there are no normally contracting actions of unimodular Lie groups on closed manifolds.

We introduce a new quasi-isometry invariant for finitely generated groups and show that every group with this property admits a subshift which is effectively closed by patterns and that cannot be realized as the topological factor of any…

We show that the closure of the compactly supported mapping class group of an infinite-type surface is not generated by the collection of multitwists (i.e. products of powers of twists about disjoint non-accumulating curves).

It is shown that for any action of a finitely presented group $G$ on an $\R$-tree, there is a decomposition of $G$ as the fundamental group of a graph of groups related to this action. If the action of $G$ on $T$ is non-trivial, i.e. there…

We study universal groups for right-angled buildings. Inspired by Simon Smith's work on universal groups for trees, we explicitly allow local groups that are not necessarily finite nor transitive. We discuss various topological and…

A compactly generated group is noncompact if and only if it admits a nonconstant harmonic function (for some, equivalently for every, reasonable measure). This generalizes the known fact that a finitely generated group is infinite if and…

Actions of finite groups on stable curves are studied. They appear naturally at the boundary of a moduli space of smooth curves with group actions. Those actions which can equivariantly smoothed are characterised. A description of…

Proper group actions are ubiquitous in mathematics and have many of the attractive features of actions of compact groups. In this survey, we discuss proper actions of Lie groups on smooth manifolds. If the group dimension is sufficiently…

It is known that the pure braid groups are residually torsion-free nilpotent. This property is however widely open for the most obvious generalizations of these groups, like pure Artin groups and like fundamental groups of hyperplane…

A finitely generated group $G$ is said to be condensed if its isomorphism class in the space of finitely generated marked groups has no isolated points. We prove that every product variety $\mathcal{UV}$, where $\mathcal{U}$ (respectively,…

This paper aims to investigate the self-similarity property in finitely-generated torsion-free nilpotent groups. We establish connections between geometric equivalence and self-similarity in these groups. Moreover, we show that any…

In two previous papers the author presented a general construction of finite, fiber- and orientation-preserving group actions on orientable Seifert manifolds. In this paper we restrict our attention to elliptic 3-manifolds. A proof is given…

One way to show that Thompson's group F is non-amenable is to exhibit an action of F on a locally compact CAT(0) space X containing no F-invariant flats and having no global fixed points in its boundary-at-infinity. We study the actions of…

We show that if all the finite coset spaces of a polycyclic group have diameter bounded uniformly below by a polynomial in their size then the group is virtually nilpotent. We obtain the same conclusion for a finitely generated residually…

We examine the question of which finitely generated groups act properly on a finite product of locally finite simplicial trees and present evidence in favour of hyperbolic surface groups having such an action. We also give a completely…

The paper is a survey of recent results in geometric representation theory describing group actions which induce multiplicity-free representations in the spaces of holomorphic functions. For connected compact Lie groups of automorphisms of…

In this paper we first survey some basic results in the cohomology of finite groups, and then discuss recent work on constructing free actions of finite groups on products of spheres.

We show that every closed nonpositively curved manifold with non-trivial volume flux group has zero minimal volume, and admits a finite covering with circle actions whose orbits are homologically essential. This proves a conjecture of…