Non Jordan groups of diffeomorphisms and actions of compact Lie groups on manifolds (Q2410921)

The purpose of this paper is to show that there exist many examples of compact differentiable manifolds whose diffeomorphism group fails to be Jordan (a group \(G\) is Jordan if there exists a constant \(C\) such that every finite subgroup \(\Gamma\) of \(G\) contains an abelian subgroup of index at most \(C\)). The method generalizes the one used by \textit{B. Csikós} et al. [``Diffeomorphism groups of compact 4-manifolds are not always Jordan'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1411.7524}] to prove that the diffeomorphism group of \(T^2\times S^2\), the product of a 2-dimensional torus and the 2-sphere, is not Jordan. The examples constructed in this paper are products of a torus \(T^s\) and a possibly non-compact manifold \(X\), admitting an almost effective action by a product of special unitary groups. The proof relies on the following theorem. Theorem. There exist functions \(\tau,M: {\mathbb N}\to {\mathbb N}\) such that for any \(n,r\in{\mathbb N}\) the following property is satisfied. Suppose that a manifold \(X\) supports an almost effective action of \(SU(\tau(n))^r\) with kernel \(H\). For any prime \(p\) not dividing \(|H|\) and satisfying \(p>M(n)\) and \(p\equiv 1 ~\text{mod}~n+1\), there exists a finite \(p\)-group \(\Gamma\) acting effectively on \(T^{2nr}\times X\) such that \(|\Gamma|=p^{2n+r}\) and \({(1)}\) if \(r=1\) then any abelian subgroup of \(\Gamma\) has at most \(p^{n+1}\) elements; \({(2)}\) if \(r>1\) then any abelian subgroup of \(\Gamma\) has at most \(p^{2+r+4n/r}\) elements. Another consequence of the above result is that if a manifold \(X\) has the property that the diffeomorphism group of \(T^2\times X\) is Jordan, then \(X\) does not support any almost effective action of any compact connected semisimple Lie group.