We prove the vanishing of the cup product of the bounded cohomology classes associated to any two Brooks quasimorphisms on the free group. This is a consequence of the vanishing of the square of a universal class for tree automorphism groups.
We use a vector field flow defined through a cubulation of a closed manifold to reconcile the partially defined commutative product on geometric cochains with the standard cup product on cubical cochains, which is fully defined and commutative only u
p to coherent homotopies. The interplay between intersection and cup product dates back to the beginnings of homology theory, but, to our knowledge, this result is the first to give an explicit cochain level comparison between these approaches.
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. Ro
ughly 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.
We prove that for geometrically finite groups cohomological dimension of the direct product of a group with itself equals 2 times the cohomological dimension dimension of the group.
We extend to positive real weights Haberlands formula giving a cohomological description of the Petersson scalar product of modular cusp forms of positive even weight. This relation is based on the cup product of an Eichler cocycle and a Knopp cocycl
e. We also consider the cup product of two Eichler cocycles attached to modular forms. In the classical context of integral weights at least $2$ this cup product is uninteresting. We show evidence that for real weights this cup product may very well be non-trivial. We approach the question whether the cup product is a non-trivial coinvariant by duality with a space of entire modular forms. Under suitable conditions on the weights this leads to an explicit triple integral involving three modular forms. We use this representation to study the cup product numerically.
We show that every continuous homogeneous quasimorphism on a finite-dimensional 1-connected simple Lie group arises as the relative growth of any continuous bi-invariant partial order on that group. More generally we show, that an arbitrary homogeneo
us quasimorphism can be reconstructed as the relative growth of a partial order subject to a certain sandwich condition. This provides a link between invariant orders and bounded cohomology and allows the concrete computation of relative growth for finite dimensional simple Lie groups as well as certain infinite-dimensional Lie groups arising from symplectic geometry.