Invariant rigid geometric structures and smooth projective factors (Q1034681)

\textit{M. Gromov} [Géométrie différentielle, Colloq. Géom. Phys., Paris/Fr. 1986, Trav. Cours 33, 65--139 (1988; Zbl 0652.53023)] generalized the notion of `structures of finite type' due to Cartan in the setting of analytic actions of simple Lie groups on manifolds preserving a rigid analytic geometric structure. In the subsequent developments of this theory, attention has been focused on unimodular structures -- in particular, with a measure invariant under the action. This paper points out that the assumption of unimodularity is significant in that it precludes several important settings (notably conformal pseudo-Riemannian structures), and develops the theory for stationary measures, which always exist. The main results therefore concern a `rigid analytic stationary system' \((M,\omega, G,\nu)\) comprising a compact connected analytic manifold \(M\) possessing a rigid analytic geometric structure of algebraic type \(\omega\), a connected non-compact almost simple Lie group \(G\) of automorphisms of \((M,\omega)\) with finite fundamental group, and an ergodic probability measure \(\nu\) with full support on \(M\) that is assumed to be stationary under some admissable measure \(\mu\) on \(G\). In this setting it is shown that either \(M\) admits a smooth equivariant map, defined on an open dense conull invariant set, onto a homogeneous projective variety, or the Zariski closure of the Gromov representation of the fundamental group contains a Lie subalgebra isomorphic to the Lie algebra of \(G\) (and hence there is a non-trivial smooth homogeneous projective factor if the fundamental group of \(M\) admits only virtually solvable linear representations); that there are examples showing that for certain simple groups of real rank one analytic rigid actions may fail to possess a smooth non-trivial projective factor; and finally that Gromov's theorem on the algebraic hull of the representation of the fundamental group extends to this setting for groups of any real rank. One of the tools developed is a generalization of Gromov's centralizer theorem from the setting of invariant measures to the stationary setting.