arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Julien Melleray.
We study full groups of minimal actions of countable groups by homeomorphisms on a Cantor space $X$, showing that these groups do not admit a compatible Polish group topology and, in the case of $\Z$-actions, are coanalytic non-Borel inside $\Homeo(X)$. We point out that the full group of a minimal homeomorphism is topologically simple. We also study some properties of the closure of the full group of a minimal homeomorphism inside $\Homeo(X)$.
We show that, whenever Gamma is a countable abelian group and Delta is a finitely-generated subgroup of Gamma, a generic measure-preserving action of Delta on a standard atomless probability space (X,mu) extends to a free measure-preserving action of Gamma on (X,mu). This extends a result of Ageev, corresponding to the case when Delta is infinite cyclic.
If $G$ is a Polish group and $Γ$ is a countable group, denote by $\Hom(Γ, G)$ the space of all homomorphisms $Γ\to G$. We study properties of the group $\cl{π(Γ)}$ for the generic $π\in \Hom(Γ, G)$, when $Γ$ is abelian and $G$ is one of the following three groups: the unitary group of an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, the automorphism group of a standard probability space, and the isometry group of the Urysohn metric space. Under mild assumptions on $Γ$, we prove that in the first case, there is (up to isomorphism of topological groups) a unique generic $\cl{π(Γ)}$; in the other two, we show that the generic $\cl{π(Γ)}$ is extremely amenable. We also show that if $Γ$ is torsion-free, the centralizer of the generic $π$ is as small as possible, extending a result of King from ergodic theory.
We define and study the notion of \emph{ample metric generics} for a Polish topological group, which is a weakening of the notion of ample generics introduced by Kechris and Rosendal in \cite{Kechris-Rosendal:Turbulence}. Our work is based on the concept of a \emph{Polish topometric group}, defined in this article. Using Kechris and Rosendal's work as a guide, we explore consequences of ample metric generics (or, more generally, ample generics for Polish topometric groups). Then we provide examples of Polish groups with ample metric generics, such as the isometry group $\Iso(\bU_1)$ of the bounded Urysohn space, the unitary group ${\mathcal U}(\ell_2)$ of a separable Hilbert space, and the automorphism group $\Aut([0,1],λ)$ of the Lebesgue measure algebra on $[0,1]$. We deduce from this and earlier work of Kittrell and Tsankov that this last group has the automatic continuity property, i.e., any morphism from $\Aut([0,1],λ)$ into a separable topological group is continuous.
Using classical results of infinite-dimensional geometry, we show that the isometry group of the Urysohn space, endowed with its usual Polish group topology, is homeomorphic to the separable Hilbert space. The proof is basedon a lemma about extensions of metric spaces by finite metric spaces, which wealso use to investigate (answering a question of I. Goldbring) the relationship, when A,B are finite subsets of the Urysohn space, between the group of isometries fixing A pointwise, the group of isometries fixing B pointwise, and the group of isometries fixing the intersection of A and B pointwise.
We reformulate, in the context of continuous logic, an oscillation theorem originally proved by G. Hjorth. We give a proof of the theorem in that setting which is similar to, but simpler than, Hjorth's original one. The point of view presented here clarifies the relation between Hjorth's theorem and first-order logic.
We compute here the Borel complexity of the relation of isometry between separable Banach spaces, using results of Gao, Kechris and Weaver.
Recently, much interest was devoted to the Urysohn universal metric space U and its isometries; this paper is a contribution to this field of research. In particular, we study some properties of isometries of U, and prove the following result, which answers a question of Urysohn: if X is a subset of U is such that, for any X' which is isometric to X there exists an isometry of U which maps X to X', then X is compact (the converse was already well-known). We also answer in the negative a question of Clemens, proving that any Polish metric space is isometric to the set of fixed points of some isometry of U.
This note is devoted to proving the following result: given a compact metrizable group G, there is a compact metric space K such that G is isomorphic (as a topological group) to the isometry group of K.
Answering a question of Gao and Kechris, we show that, given any polish group G, there exists a closed subset F of Urysohn's universal metric space U such that G is (topologically) isomorphic to the subgroup of isometries of U which map F onto itself.