Remarks on pseudocharacters and the real continuous bounded cohomology of connected locally compact groups (Q5956403)

A pseudocharacter on a group \(G\) is a real-valued function \(f\) on \(G\) that satisfies the following properties: (1) \(f(x^n)=f(x)^n\) for all \(x\in G\) and \(n\in {\mathbb N}\), and (2) there is some constant \(C_f\) such that \(|f(xy)-f(x)-f(y)|\leq C_f\) for all \(x,y \in G\). The first part of this paper is mostly devoted to establish triviality and factorization results for continuous pseudocharacters on locally compact groups that will be later applied to the description of their second bounded cohomology groups. Let \(H_b^2(G,{\mathbb R})\) and \(H^2(G,\mathbb R)\) denote respectively the second bounded cohomology group of \(G\) and the group of van Est cohomologies. The kernel of the natural map \( H_b^2(G,{\mathbb R})\to H^2(G,{\mathbb R}) \) can be identified with a quotient of the space of continuous pseudocharacters and provides the link between continuous bounded cohomology and the continuous pseudocharacters of \(G\). This observation combined with the machinery elaborated in the first part of the paper (which eventually allows to factorize every continuous pseudocharacter on a connected \(G\) through some quotient of \(G\) that is a central extension of a semisimple Lie group by a finite-dimensional vector space) is finally applied to prove the main result of the paper, that the second bounded cohomology group \(H^2_b(G,\mathbb R)\) of a locally compact connected group \(G\) is always finite dimensional.