Weakly Hyperbolic Actions of Kazhdan Groups on Tori

We study the ergodic and rigidity properties of weakly hyperbolic actions. First, we establish ergodicity for C² volume preserving weakly hyperbolic group actions on closed manifolds. For the integral action generated by a single Anosov diffeomorphism this theorem is classical and originally due to Anosov. Motivated by the Franks/Manning classification of Anosov diffeomorphisms on tori, we restrict our attention to weakly hyperbolic actions on the torus. When the acting group is a lattice subgroup of a semisimple Lie group with no compact factors and all (almost) simple factors of real rank at least two, we show that weak hyperbolicity in the original action implies weak hyperbolicity for the induced action on the fundamental group. As a corollary, we obtain that any such action on the torus is continuously semiconjugate to the affine action coming from the fundamental group via a map unique in the homotopy class of the identity. Under the additional assumption that some partially hyperbolic group element has quasi-isometrically embedded lifts of unstable leaves to the universal cover, we obtain a conjugacy, resulting in a continuous classification for these actions. Partially funded by VIGRE grant DMS-9977371 Received: January 2005 Revision: August 2005 Accepted: September 2005