Related papers: Trees and mapping class groups
It is a classical result of Powell that pure mapping class groups of connected, orientable surfaces of finite type and genus at least three are perfect. In stark contrast, we construct nontrivial homomorphisms from infinite-genus mapping…
We show that pseudo-Anosov mapping classes are generic in every Cayley graph of the mapping class group of a finite-type hyperbolic surface. Our method also yields an analogous result for rank-one CAT(0) groups and hierarchically hyperbolic…
We establish that, given $\Sigma$ a compact orientable surface, and $G$ a finitely presented one-ended group, the set of copies of $G$ in the mapping class group $\mathcal{MCG}(\Sigma)$ consisting of only pseudo-anosov elements except…
We consider unicellular maps, or polygon gluings, of fixed genus. A few years ago the first author gave a recursive bijection transforming unicellular maps into trees, explaining the presence of Catalan numbers in counting formulas for…
Alain Connes and Nigel Higson pointed out in the 1990s that the Connes-Kasparov "conjecture"' for the K-theory of reduced groupe $C^\ast$-algebras seemed, in the case of reductive Lie groups, to be a cohomological echo of a conjecture of…
The Torelli group $\mathcal T(X)$ of a closed smooth manifold $X$ is the subgroup of the mapping class group $\pi_0(\mathrm{Diff}^+(X))$ consisting of elements which act trivially on the integral cohomology of $X$. In this note we give…
We show that there is a type-preserving homomorphism from the fundamental group of the figure-eight knot complement to the mapping class group of the thrice-punctured torus. As a corollary, we obtain infinitely many commensurability classes…
Atiyah proved that the moment map image of the closure of an orbit of a complex torus action is convex. Brion generalized this result to actions of a complex reductive group. We extend their results to actions of a maximal solvable…
This article is dedicated to the study of asymptotically rigid mapping class groups of infinitely-punctured surfaces obtained by thickening planar trees. Such groups include the braided Ptolemy-Thompson groups $T^\sharp,T^\ast$ introduced…
The Kurosh theorem for groups provides the structure of any subgroup of a free product of groups and its proof relies on Bass-Serre theory of groups acting on trees. In the case of Lie algebras, such a general theory does not exists and the…
We consider the pseudo-Anosov elements of the mapping class group of a surface of genus g that fix a rank k subgroup of the first homology of the surface. We show that the smallest entropy among these is comparable to (k+1)/g. This…
Given any generating set of any pseudo-Anosov-containing subgroup of the mapping class group of a surface, we construct a pseudo-Anosov with word length bounded by a constant depending only on the surface. More generally, in any subgroup G…
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…
The main goal of this paper is a detailed study of asymptotic cones of the mapping class groups. In particular, we prove that every asymptotic cone of a mapping class group has a bi-Lipschitz equivariant embedding into a product of real…
This thesis is devoted to the study of the interactions existing between the algebraic structure of locally compact groups and the properties of their continuous unitary representations, with a special emphasis on the Type I groups. On the…
In \cite{Kramer11} Kramer proves for a large class of semisimple Lie groups that they admit just one locally compact $\sigma$-compact Hausdorff topology compatible with the group operations. We present two different methods of generalising…
We prove that if $G$ is a noncompact connected real reductive linear Lie group, then any discrete subgroup of $G$ acting properly discontinuously and cocompactly on some homogeneous space $G/H$ of $G$ is quasi-isometrically embedded and…
We prove that every endomorphism of the mapping class group of an orientable surface onto a subgroup of finite index is in fact an automorphism.
Let $\FN$ be a free group of finite rank $N \geq 2$, and let $T$ be an $\R$-tree with a very small, minimal action of $\FN$ with dense orbits. For any basis $\CA$ of $\FN$ there exists a {\em heart} $K_{\CA} \subset \bar T$ (= the metric…
Herein we prove that if $M$ is a compact oriented Riemann surface of genus $g$, and $M^{[n]}$ is the classifying space of $n$ distinct, unordered points on $M$, then the kernel of the map $\pi_1(M^{[n]})\to H_1(M)$ is generated by…