Related papers: Simple groups without lattices

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.…

We investigate a family of groups acting on a regular tree, defined by prescribing the local action almost everywhere. We study lattices in these groups and give examples of compactly generated simple groups of finite asymptotic dimension…

We give sufficient conditions for a subgroup of a tree almost automorphism group to be isomorphic to the topological full groups of a one-sided shift in the sense of Matui. As an application, we show that almost automorphism groups of trees…

We consider the finitely generated groups acting on a regular tree with almost prescribed local action. We show that these groups embed as cocompact irreducible lattices in some locally compact wreath products. This provides examples of…

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)…

Let T be a d-regular tree (d > 2) and A=Aut(T), its automorphism group. Let G be a group generated by n independent Haar-random elements of A. We show that almost surely, every nontrivial element of G has finitely many fixed points on T.

The following two results are shown. 1) Let $G$ be the $k$-rational points of a simple algebraic group over a local field $k$ and let $H$ be a lattice in $G.$ Then the regular representation of $G$ on $L^2(G/H)$ has a spectral gap (that is,…

We show that S-arithmetic lattices in semisimple Lie groups with no rank one factors are quasi-isometrically rigid.

We use the structure lattice, introduced in Part I, to undertake a systematic study of the class $\mathscr S$ consisting of compactly generated, topologically simple, totally disconnected locally compact groups that are non-discrete. Given…

A group is boundedly simple if, for some constant N, every nontrivial conjugacy class generates the whole group in N steps. For a large class of trees, Tits proved simplicity of a canonical subgroup of the automorphism group, which is…

Let $\Gamma \leq \mathrm{Aut}(T_{d_1}) \times \mathrm{Aut}(T_{d_2})$ be a group acting freely and transitively on the product of two regular trees of degree $d_1$ and $d_2$. We develop an algorithm which computes the closure of the…

In this paper we show that a certain solvable Lie group constructed in a paper by Benson and Gordon has no lattices. This result answers (in the negative way) a question posed by several authors in the context of symplectic geometry. The…

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…

We present a contribution to the structure theory of locally compact groups. The emphasis is on compactly generated locally compact groups which admit no infinite discrete quotient. It is shown that such a group possesses a characteristic…

The unitary representation theory of locally compact contraction groups and their semi-direct products with $\mathbb{Z}$ is studied. We put forward the problem of completely characterising such groups which are type I or CCR and this…

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…

We initiate an investigation of lattices in a new class of locally compact groups, so called locally pro-$p$-complete Kac-Moody groups. We discover that in rank 2 their cocompact lattices are particularly well-behaved: under mild…

Let $T$ be a tree and $e$ an edge in $T$. If $C$ is a component of $T\setminus e$ and both $C$ and its complement are infinite we say that $C$ is a half-tree. The main result of this paper is that if $G$ is a closed subgroup of the…

We prove a simplicity criterion for certain twin tree lattices. It applies to all rank two Kac-Moody groups over finite fields with non-trivial commutation relations, thereby yielding examples of simple non-uniform lattices in the product…

We establish three independent results on groups acting on trees. The first implies that a compactly generated locally compact group which acts continuously on a locally finite tree with nilpotent local action and no global fixed point is…