Characterising actions on trees yielding non-trivial quasimorphisms

We study the construction of quasimorphisms on groups acting on trees introduced by Monod and Shalom, that we call median quasimorphisms, and in particular we fully characterise actions on trees that give rise to non-trivial median quasimorphisms. Roughly speaking, either the action is highly transitive on geodesics, it fixes a point in the boundary, or there exists an infinite family of non-trivial median quasimorphisms. In particular, in the last case the second bounded cohomology of the group is infinite dimensional as a vector space. As an application, we show that a cocompact lattice in a product of trees only has trivial quasimorphisms if and only if both closures of the projections on the two factors are locally $infty$-transitive.

Relative second bounded cohomology of free groups

This paper is devoted to the computation of the space $H_b^2(Gamma,H;mathbb{R})$, where $Gamma$ is a free group of finite rank $ngeq 2$ and $H$ is a subgroup of finite rank. More precisely we prove that $H$ has infinite index in $Gamma$ if and only if $H_b^2(Gamma,H;mathbb{R})$ is not trivial, and furthermore, if and only if there is an isometric embedding $oplus_infty^nmathcal{D}(mathbb{Z})hookrightarrow H_b^2(Gamma,H;mathbb{R})$, where $mathcal{D}(mathbb{Z})$ is the space of bounded alternating functions on $mathbb{Z}$ equipped with the defect norm.