Construction of Milnorian representations

Abstract

We prove a partial converse to the main theorem of the author's previous paper "Proper affine actions: a sufficient criterion" (submitted; available at arXiv:1612.08942). More precisely, let $G$ be a semisimple real Lie group with a representation $\rho$ on a finite-dimensional real vector space $V$, that does not satisfy the criterion from the previous paper. Assuming that $\rho$ is irreducible and under some additional assumptions on $G$ and $\rho$, we then prove that there does not exist a group of affine transformations acting properly discontinuously on $V$ whose linear part is Zariski-dense in $\rho(G)$.