Amenability, Kazhdan's property and percolation for trees, groups and equivalence relations (Q1196320)

In this very interesting and clearly-written article, the authors first review two notions of amenability for group actions. One is defined in terms of invariant means and the other (due to R. Zimmer) in terms of fixed points. They show that both notions are in some sense complementary, and they propose to call the first one ``co-amenability''. In the reviewer's opinion, it is rather the second one that should be called ``co-amenability''. Next, the authors discuss the notion of amenability for equivalence relations, a notion due to A. Kechris. They prove amenability for a large class of equivalence relations which have trees associated to the equivalence classes. It should be mentioned that their proof uses percolation on trees. They also discuss amenability of groups of automorphisms of a tree, recovering some results of C. Nebbia and W. Woess. In the final part of the article, the following theorem is proved. Let \(G\) be a noncompact, almost simple Lie group with Kazhdan's property (T). Let \(M\) be a closed manifold with a nontrivial connection-preserving and volume-preserving action of \(G\). Then the fundamental group \(\Gamma\) of \(M\) cannot act properly on a tree. This extends a result of R. Zimmer stating that \(\Gamma\) is not an amalgam of two finite groups.