We show that the group of type-preserving automorphisms of any irreducible semiregular thick right-angled building is abstractly simple. When the building is locally finite, this gives a large family of compactly generated abstractly simple locally compact groups. Specialising to appropriate cases, we obtain examples of such simple groups that are locally indecomposable, but have locally normal subgroups decomposing non-trivially as direct products, all of whose factors are locally normal.
Let be a building of arbitrary type. A compactification of the set of spherical residues of is introduced. We prove that it coincides with the horofunction compactification of endowed with a natural combinatorial distance which we call the . Points of admit amenable stabilisers in and conversely, any amenable subgroup virtually fixes a point in . In addition, it is shown that, provided is transitive enough, this compactification also coincides with the group-theoretic compactification...
We give a complete characterization of the locally compact groups that are non elementary Gromov-hyperbolic and amenable. They coincide with the class of mapping tori of discrete or continuous one-parameter groups of compacting automorphisms. We moreover give a description of all Gromov-hyperbolic locally compact groups with a cocompact amenable subgroup: modulo a compact normal subgroup, these turn out to be either rank one simple Lie groups, or automorphism groups of semiregular trees acting doubly...
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