Damien Gaboriau a montré récemment que les nombres de Betti des feuilletages mesurés à feuilles contractiles sont des invariants de la relation d’équivalence associée. Sorin Popa a utilisé ce résultat joint à des propriétés de rigidité des facteurs de type II pour en déduire l’existence de facteurs de type II dont le groupe fondamental est trivial.
For any , we construct a concrete 1-parameter family of non-orbit equivalent actions of the free group . These actions arise as diagonal products between a generalized Bernoulli action and the action , where is seen as a subgroup of .
In functional analysis, approximative properties of an object become precise in its ultrapower. We discuss this idea and its consequences for automorphisms of II₁ factors. Here are some sample results: (1) an automorphism is approximately inner if and only if its ultrapower is ℵ₀-locally inner; (2) the ultrapower of an outer automorphism is always outer; (3) for unital *-homomorphisms from a separable nuclear C*-algebra into an ultrapower of a II₁ factor, equality of the induced traces implies unitary...