Abstract Commensurators of Groups Acting on Rooted Trees

We show that the abstract commensurator of a nearly level transitive weakly branch group H coincides with the relative commensurator of H in the homeomorphism group of the boundary of the tree on which H acts. It is also shown that the commensurator of an infinite group which is commensurable with its own nth direct power contains a Higman–Thompson group as a subgroup. Applying these results to the Grigorchuk 2-group G we show that the commensurator of G is a finitely presented infinite simple group.