Measure rigidity for solvable group actions in the space of lattices (Q2003531)

\textit{M. Ratner}'s [Ann. Math. (2) 134, No. 3, 545--607 (1991; Zbl 0763.28012)] famous measure rigidity result concerns the actions of subgroups \(H\) generated by unipotents on homogeneous spaces \(G/\Gamma\). Here, \(H \subset G\) acts by left multiplication, and \(\Gamma\) is a lattice in \(G\). A paraphrase of the statement is that any ergodic invariant probability measure is homogeneous, that is, it is Haar measure on \(L/L \cap g\Gamma g^{-1}\), where \(H \subset L\), and \(L \cap g\Gamma g^{-1}\) is a lattice in \(L\). An important special case, due to connections to the geometry of numbers and Diophantine approximation is \(G = \mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb R)\) and \(\Gamma = \mathrm{SL}(n, \mathbb Z)\). In Diophantine applications, it is often of interest to try to understand the invariant measures and orbit closures for the group generated by the group generated by unipotents together with the one-parameter diagonal groups which normalize groups generated by unipotents. The elegant main result of the paper is as follows. Let \(F\) be a subgroup of \(G = \mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{R})\), \(n\geq 2\), generated by one-parameter unipotent subgroups. Let \(S=\{a_t:t\in\mathbb{R}\}\) be a simple one-parameter \(\mathbb R\)-diagonalizable subgroup of \(G\) normalizing \(F\). Then any \(SF\)-invariant ergodic probability measure on \(\mathrm{SL}(n, \mathbb{R})/\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{Z})\) is homogeneous. This simplicity assumption is necessary, as \textit{R. Shi} and \textit{B. Weiss} [Isr. J. Math. 219, No. 1, 479--505 (2017; Zbl 1430.11093)] pointed out, even for \(n = 4\). Without the simplicity assumption there are homogeneous and even non-homogeneous \(SF\)-invariant and ergodic probability measures.