Non-simplicity of the Cremona group over any field (Q507095)

This paper extends the main result of \textit{S. Cantat} et al. [Acta Math. 210, No. 1, 31--94 (2013; Zbl 1278.14017)], by proving that the Cremona group, or group of birational selfmaps of the plane, is not simple as an abstract group, over any base field. By recent results by Dahmani, Guirardel and Osin [\textit{F. Dahmani} et al., Mem. Am. Math. Soc. 245, No. 1156 (2017)] to prove that a group \(G\) admits a lot of (free) normal subgroups, it is sufficient to find an action of \(G\) on a Gromov hyperbolic space \(X\) such that at least one element in \(G\) acts as a loxodromic isometry with the WPD property (for Weakly Properly Discontinuous). In the context of the Cremona group, one takes as the space \(X\) an infinite dimensional hyperboloid, that lives inside the inverse limit of the Néron-Severi groups for all surfaces dominating the projective plane by a sequence of blow-ups. Then the main result of the paper is that the element of the Cremona group that is written \((x,y) \mapsto (y, y^n - x)\) in an affine chart has the WPD property, as soon as \(n \geq 2\) is not a multiple of the characteristic of the base field.