Irreducible affine isometric actions on Hilbert spaces

TL;DR

This paper systematically studies irreducible affine isometric actions of locally compact groups on Hilbert spaces, revealing differences from unitary representation theory and providing new characterizations and super-rigidity results.

Contribution

It introduces an affine Schur's lemma, characterizes irreducible affine actions, and establishes super-rigidity for actions of product groups on lattices.

Findings

Characterization of irreducible affine actions via an affine Schur's lemma

Description of irreducible affine actions of nilpotent groups

Super-rigidity of affine actions for lattices in product groups

Abstract

We undertake a systematic study of irreducible affine isometric actions of locally compact groups on Hilbert spaces. It turns out that, while that are a few parallels of this study to the by now classical theory of irreducible unitary representations, these two theories differ in several aspects (for instance, the direct sum of two irreducible affine actions can still be irreducible). One of the main tools we use is an affine version of Schur's lemma characterizing the irreducibility of an affine isometric group action. This enables us to describe for instance the irreducible affine isometric actions of nilpotent groups. As another application, a short proof is provided for the following result of Neretin: the restriction to a cocompact lattice of an irreducible affine action of locally compact group remains irreducible. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a fixed unitary representation to be the linear part of an irreducible affine action. In particular, when the unitary representation is a multiple of the regular representation of a discrete group G, we show how this question is related to the L2-Betti number of G. After giving a necessary and sufficient condition for a direct sum of irreducible affine actions to be irreducible, we show the following super-rigidity result: if G is product of two or more locally compact groups, then every irreducible affine action of any irreducible co-compact lattice in G extends to an affine action of G, provided the linear part of this action does not weakly contain the trivial representation.