Texas A&M University, Department of Mathematics, 216 Milner Hall, 25th of February 2004, 3:00-4:00

Groups and Dynamcs Seminar


Superrigidity and geometric splitting

Nicolas Monod of University of Chicago

We prove general superrigidity results for actions of irreducible lattices on CAT(0) spaces. In particular, one obtains a new proof of Margulis' superrigidity theorem for uniform irreducible lattices in non-simple Lie (or algebraic) groups. The proofs rely on simple geometric arguments, including a splitting theorem which can be viewed as an infinite-dimensional (and singular) generalization of the Gromoll-Wolf/Lawson-Yau theorem.