Amenable isometry groups of Hadamard spaces (Q1271226)

Recall that a Hadamard space is a complete simply connected geodesic space of nonpositive curvature in the triangle comparison sense. A flat in a Hadamard space is a closed convex subspace which is isometric to a finite dimensional Euclidean space. The main result of this paper is that any amenable group of isometries of a locally compact Hadamard space either fixes a point at infinity of stabilizes a flat. For Hadamard manifolds, this result was proved by \textit{M. Burger} and \textit{V. Schroeder} [Math. Ann. 276, 505-514 (1987; Zbl 0599.53036)]. Even though the line of the proof is similar for Hadamard spaces, there are many technical difficulties related to the fact that a locally compact Hadamard space does not have to be geodesically complete or finite dimensional. Here is a sample corollary. Let \(\Gamma\) be an amenable group of isometries of a geodesically complete, locally compact Hadamard space \(X\). If \(\Gamma\) satisfies the duality condition, then \(X\) is a flat Euclidean space. The paper ends with several examples showing that the assumptions of the main theorem are, in a sense, optimal.