No Arabic abstract
We show that the identity component of the group of diffeomorphisms of a closed oriented surface of positive genus admits many unbounded quasi-morphisms. As a corollary, we also deduce that this group is not uniformly perfect and its fragmentation norm is unbounded, answering a question of Burago--Ivanov--Polterovich. As a key tool we construct a hyperbolic graph on which these groups act, which is the analog of the curve graph for the mapping class group.
In this paper we consider convex co-compact subgroups of the projective linear group. We prove that such a group is relatively hyperbolic with respect to a collection of virtually Abelian subgroups of rank two if and only if each open face in the ideal boundary has dimension at most one. We also introduce the coarse Hilbert dimension of a subset of a convex set and use it to characterize when a naive convex co-compact subgroup is word hyperbolic or relatively hyperbolic with respect to a collection of virtually Abelian subgroups of rank two.
It is known that every infinite index quasi-convex subgroup $H$ of a non-elementary hyperbolic group $G$ is a free factor in a larger quasi-convex subgroup of $G$. We give a probabilistic generalization of this result. That is, we show that when $R$ is a subgroup generated by independent random walks in $G$, then $langle H, Rranglecong Hast R$ with probability going to one as the lengths of the random walks go to infinity and this subgroup is quasi-convex in $G$. Moreover, our results hold for a large class of groups acting on hyperbolic metric spaces and subgroups with quasi-convex orbits. In particular, when $G$ is the mapping class group of a surface and $H$ is a convex cocompact subgroup we show that $langle H, Rrangle$ is convex cocompact and isomorphic to $ Hast R$.
We prove that every finitely generated Kleinian group that contains a finite, non-cyclic subgroup either is finite or virtually free or contains a surface subgroup. Hence, every arithmetic Kleinian group contains a surface subgroup.
Let $X$ be a compact orientable non-Haken 3-manifold modeled on the Thurston geometry $text{Nil}$. We show that the diffeomorphism group $text{Diff}(X)$ deformation retracts to the isometry group $text{Isom}(X)$. Combining this with earlier work by many authors, this completes the determination the homotopy type of $text{Diff}(X)$ for any compact, orientable, prime 3-manifold $X$.
We define a notion of semi-conjugacy between orientation-preserving actions of a group on the circle, which for fixed point free actions coincides with a classical definition of Ghys. We then show that two circle actions are semi-conjugate if and only if they have the same bounded Euler class. This settles some existing confusion present in the literature.