Sofic equivalence relations

We introduce the notion of sofic measurable equivalence relations. Using them we prove that Connes' Embedding Conjecture as well as the Measurable Determinant Conjecture of Lück, Sauer and Wegner hold for treeable equivalence relations.     

Measure equivalence rigidity and bi-exactness of groups

We get three types of results on measurable group theory; direct product groups of Ozawa's class S groups, wreath product groups and amalgamated free products. We prove measure equivalence factorization results on direct product groups of Ozawa's class S groups. As consequences, Monod-Shalom type orbit equivalence rigidity theorems follow. We prove that if two wreath product groups A?G, B?Γ of non-amenable exact direct product groups G, Γ with amenable bases A, B are measure equivalent, then G and Γ are measure equivalent. We get Bass-Serre rigidity results on amalgamated free products of non-amenable exact direct product groups.     

On sofic monoids

We investigate a notion of soficity for monoids. A group is sofic as a group if and only if it is sofic as a monoid. All finite monoids, all commutative monoids, all free monoids, all cancellative one-sided amenable monoids, all multiplicative monoids of matrices over a field, and all monoids obtained by adjoining an identity element to a semigroup are sofic. On the other hand, although the question of the existence of a non-sofic group remains open, we prove that the bicyclic monoid is not sofic. This shows that there exist finitely presented amenable inverse monoids that are non-sofic.     

Zero Divisors in Amalgamated Free Products of Lie Algebras

We introduce the notion of domain for Lie algebras, discuss when the free amalgamated Lie product of two domains is a domain again, classify commuting elements in the free amalgamated product of two Lie algebras and describe the center of this product.     

Hyperlinearity,essentially free actions and <Emphasis Type="Italic">L</Emphasis><Superscript>2</Superscript>-invariants. The sofic property

We prove that Connes Embedding Conjecture holds for the von Neumann algebras of sofic groups, that is sofic groups are hyperlinear. Hence we provide some new examples of hyperlinearity. We also show that the Determinant Conjecture holds for sofic groups as well. We introduce the notion of essentially free actions and amenable actions and study their properties.Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 43A07, 55N25     

Local variational principle concerning entropy of a sofic group action

Recently Lewis Bowen introduced a notion of entropy for measure-preserving actions of countable sofic groups admitting a generating measurable partition with finite entropy; and then David Kerr and Hanfeng Li developed an operator-algebraic approach to actions of countable sofic groups not only on a standard probability space but also on a compact metric space, and established the global variational principle concerning measure-theoretic and topological entropy in this sofic context. By localizing these two kinds of entropy, in this paper we prove a local version of the global variational principle for any finite open cover of the space, and show that these local measure-theoretic and topological entropies coincide with their classical counterparts when the acting group is an infinite amenable group.     

A certain synchronizing property of subshifts and flow equivalence

We will study a certain synchronizing property of subshifts called λ-synchronization. The λ-synchronizing subshifts form a large class of irreducible subshifts containing irreducible sofic shifts. We prove that the λ-synchronization is invariant under flow equivalence of subshifts. The λ-synchronizing K-groups and the λ-synchronizing Bowen-Franks groups are studied and proved to be invariant under flow equivalence of λ-synchronizing subshifts. They are new flow equivalence invariants for λ-synchronizing subshifts.     

Typical equivalence of linear groups and other algebraic systems

The paper is devoted to the notion of typical equivalence introduced by B. I. Plotkin. We give some examples of elementarily equivalent objects that are not typically equivalent and show two ways to construct nonisomorphic typically equivalent algebras. We also prove A. I. Maltsev??s theorem on elementary equivalence of linear groups over fields for the case of typical equivalence.     

On sofic groupoids and their full groups

We prove that the class of sofic groupoids is stable under several measure-theoretic constructions. In particular, we show that virtually sofic groupoids are sofic. We answer a question of Conley, Kechris, and Tucker-Drob by proving that an aperiodic pmp groupoid is sofic if and only if its full group is metrically sofic.     

Harmonic models and spanning forests of residually finite groups

We prove a number of identities relating the sofic entropy of a certain class of non-expansive algebraic dynamical systems, the sofic entropy of the Wired Spanning Forest and the tree entropy of Cayley graphs of residually finite groups. We also show that homoclinic points and periodic points in harmonic models are dense under general conditions.     

On the mean square of the remainder for the euclidean lattice point counting problem

We study an invariant of dynamical systems called naive entropy, which is defined for both measurable and topological actions of any countable group. We focus on nonamenable groups, in which case the invariant is two-valued, with every system having naive entropy either zero or infinity. Bowen has conjectured that when the acting group is sofic, zero naive entropy implies sofic entropy at most zero for both types of systems. We prove the topological version of this conjecture by showing that for every action of a sofic group by homeomorphisms of a compact metric space, zero naive entropy implies sofic entropy at most zero. This result and the simple definition of naive entropy allow us to show that the generic action of a free group on the Cantor set has sofic entropy at most zero. We observe that a distal Γ-system has zero naive entropy in both senses, if Γ has an element of infinite order. We also show that the naive entropy of a topological system is greater than or equal to the naive measure entropy of the same system with respect to any invariant measure.     

Sofic groups and direct finiteness

We construct an analogue of von Neumann's affiliated algebras for sofic group algebras over arbitrary fields. Consequently, we settle Kaplansky's direct finiteness conjecture for sofic groups.     

Virtually free pro-p groups

We prove that in the category of pro-p groups any finitely generated group G with a free open subgroup splits either as an amalgamated free product or as an HNN-extension over a finite p-group. From this result we deduce that such a pro-p group is the pro-p completion of a fundamental group of a finite graph of finite p-groups.     

Deformation of Gabor systems

We introduce a new notion for the deformation of Gabor systems. Such deformations are in general nonlinear and, in particular, include the standard jitter error and linear deformations of phase space. With this new notion we prove a strong deformation result for Gabor frames and Gabor Riesz sequences that covers the known perturbation and deformation results. Our proof of the deformation theorem requires a new characterization of Gabor frames and Gabor Riesz sequences. It is in the style of Beurling's characterization of sets of sampling for bandlimited functions and extends significantly the known characterization of Gabor frames “without inequalities” from lattices to non-uniform sets.     

Sofic groups and diophantine approximation

We prove the algebraic eigenvalue conjecture of J. Dodziuk, P. Linnell, V. Mathai, T. Schick, and S. Yates (see [2]) for sofic groups. Moreover, we give restrictions on the spectral measure of elements in the integral group ring. Finally, we define integer operators and prove a quantization of the operator norm below 2. To the knowledge of the author, there is no group known that is not sofic. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Coût des relations d’équivalence et des groupes

We study a new dynamical invariant for dicrete groups: the cost. It is a real number in {1−1/n}∪[1,∞], bounded by the number of generators of the group, and it is well behaved with respect to finite index subgroups. Namely, the quantities 1 minus the cost are related by multiplying by the index. The cost of every infinite amenable group equals 1. We compute it in some other situations, including free products, free products with amalgamation and HNN-extensions over amenable groups and for direct product situations. For instance, the cost of the free group on n generators equals n. We prove that each possible finite value of the cost is achieved by a finitely generated group. It is dynamical because it relies on measure preserving free actions on probability Borel spaces. In most cases, groups have fixed price, which implies that two freely acting groups which define the same orbit partition must have the same cost. It enables us to distinguish the orbit partitions of probability-preserving free actions of free groups of different ranks. At the end of the paper, we give a mercuriale, i.e. a list of costs of different groups. The cost is in fact an invariant of ergodic measure-preserving equivalence relations and is defined using graphings. A treeing is a measurable way to provide every equivalence class (=orbit) with the structure of a simplicial tree, this an example of graphing. Not every relation admits a treeing: we prove that every free action of a cost 1 non-amenable group is not treeable, but we prove that subrelations of treeable relations are treeable. We give examples of relations which cannot be produced by an action of any finitely generated group. The cost of a relation which can be decomposed as a direct product is shown to be 1. We define the notion for a relation to be a free product or an HNN-extension and compute the cost for the resulting relation from the costs of the building blocks. The cost is also an invariant of the pairs von Neumann algebra/Cartan subalgebra. Oblatum 27-I-1999 & 4-IV-1999 / Published online: 22 September 1999     

Bernoulli actions of sofic groups have completely positive entropy

We prove that every Bernoulli action of a sofic group has completely positive entropy with respect to every sofic approximation net. We also prove that every Bernoulli action of a finitely generated free group has the property that each of its nontrivial factors with a finite generating partition has positive f-invariant.     

Residual Properties of Free Products

Let 𝒞 be a class of groups. We give sufficient conditions ensuring that a free product of residually 𝒞 groups is again residually 𝒞, and analogous conditions are given for LE-𝒞 groups. As a corollary, we obtain that the class of residually amenable groups and the one of locally embeddable into amenable (LEA) groups are closed under taking free products.

Moreover, we consider the pro-𝒞 topology and we characterize special HNN extensions and amalgamated free products that are residually 𝒞, where 𝒞 is a suitable class of groups. In this way, we describe special HNN extensions and amalgamated free products that are residually amenable.     

Sufficient conditions for the root-class residuality of certain generalized free products

Given a class K of groups, we prove that the free product of a K -group A and a residually K -group B with amalgamated subgroup which is a retract of B is a residually K -group. We also obtain a sufficient condition for the root-class residuality of a generalized free product of two residually K -groups with amalgamated subgroup which is a retract of one of the factors.     

A Note on the Double Affine Hecke Algebra of Type GL2

We express the double affine Hecke algebra ? associated to the general linear group GL₂(k) (here, k is a field with char(k) ≠ 2) as an amalgamated free product of quadratic extensions over the three-dimensional quantum torus 𝒪_q((k^×)³). With an eye towards proving ring-theoretic results pertaining to ?, a general treatment of amalgamated products of Ore and quadratic extensions is given. We prove an analogue of the Hilbert Basis Theorem for an amalgamated product Q of quadratic extensions and determine conditions for when the one-sided ideals of Q are principal or doubly-generated. Furthermore, we determine sufficient conditions which imply Q is a principal ideal ring. Finally, we construct an explicit isomorphism from ? to the amalgamated free product ring of quadratic extensions over 𝒪_q((k^×)³), a ring known to be noetherian. Therefore, it follows that ? is noetherian.