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We study harmonic functions and Poisson boundaries for Borel probability measures on general (i.e., not necessarily locally compact) topological groups, and we prove that a second-countable topological group is amenable if and only if it…

We show that on groups generated by bounded activity automata, every symmetric, finitely supported probability measure has the Liouville property. More generally we show this for every group of automorphisms of bounded type of a rooted…

This is the written version of the Bourbaki seminar given in January 2013 and published in 2014 (modulo an additional early reference added subsequently). It describes the first construction of infinite, finitely generated amenable simple…

We show that every Grigorchuk group $G_\omega$ embeds in (the commutator subgroup of) the topological full group of a minimal subshift. In particular, the topological full group of a Cantor minimal system can have subgroups of intermediate…

For every non-hyper-FC-central countable amenable group and every $k\geq 2$, we provide a sequence of symmetric, fully supported probability measures such that their convex combination is non-Liouville (that is it admits a non-constant…

We begin by giving a new proof of the equivalence between the Liouville property and vanishing of the drift for symmetric random walks with finite first moments on finitely generated groups; a result which was first established by…

Given a finitely generated group, the well-known Stability Problem asks whether the non-triviality of the Poisson-Furstenberg boundary (which is equivalent to the existence of non-constant bounded harmonic functions) depends on the choice…

We prove that random walks on Thompson's group $F$ driven by strictly non-degenerate finitely supported probability measures $\mu$ have a non-trivial Poisson boundary. The proof consists in an explicit construction of two different…

Let $\Gamma$ be a countable discrete group, $H$ a lcsc totally disconnected group and $\rho : \Gamma \rightarrow H$ a homomorphism with dense image. We develop a general and explicit technique which provides, for every compact open subgroup…

We show that finitely generated groups which are Liouville and without infinite finite-dimensional linear representations must have a global fixed point whenever they act by isometry on a finite-dimensional complete CAT(0)-space. This…

We study the Poisson-Furstenberg boundary of random walks on permutational wreath products. We give a sufficient condition for a group to admit a symmetric measure of finite first moment with non-trivial boundary, and show that this…

For any countable group with infinite conjugacy classes we construct a family of forests on the group. For each of them there is a random walk on the group with the property that its sample paths almost surely converge to the geometric…

We give sufficient conditions for the non-triviality of the Poisson boundary of random walks on $H(\mathbb{Z})$ and its subgroups. The group $H(\mathbb{Z})$ is the group of piecewise projective homeomorphisms over the integers defined by…

We construct a finitely generated group $G$ without the Liouville property such that the return probability of a random walk satisfies $p_{2n}(e,e) \gtrsim e^{-n^{1/2 + o(1)}}$. Recent results suggest that $1/2$ is indeed the smallest…

In this paper, we study several finite approximation properties of topological full groups of group actions on the Cantor set such that free points are dense. Firstly, we establish that for such a distal action $\alpha$ of a countable…

The main aim of the present set of notes is to give new, short and essentially self-contained proofs of some classical, as well as more recent, results about random walks on groups. For instance, we shall see that the drift characterization…

Conformal dimension is a fundamental invariant of metric spaces, particularly suited to the study of self-similar spaces, such as spaces with an expanding self-covering (e.g. Julia sets of complex rational functions). The dynamics of these…

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 consider random walks on semisimple Lie groups where the support of the step distribution generates (as a group) a Zariski dense discrete subgroup of infinite covolume. When the semisimple Lie group has property (T), we show that the…

Asymptotic properties of finitely generated subgroups of free groups, and of finite group presentations, can be considered in several fashions, depending on the way these objects are represented and on the distribution assumed on these…