Group measure space decomposition of \(\text{II}_{1}\) factors and \(\text W^{*}\)-superrigidity (Q607647)

From the abstract and introduction of the paper: Rigidity results have appeared in many areas of mathematics. They refer to two mathematical objects with rich structure that are known to be equivalent in some ``weak sense'', which ignores part of the structure, are isomorphic as objects with the full structure. In the paper the authors prove a ``unique crossed product decomposition'' result for group measure space \(II_1\) factors \(L^\infty (X)\rtimes \Gamma\) arising from arbitrary free ergodic probability measure preserving (p.m.p.) actions of groups \(\Gamma\) in a fairly large family \(\mathcal G\) which contains all free products of a Kazhdan group and a non-trivial group, as well as certain amalgamated free products over an amenable subgroup. It is deduced that if \(T_n\) denotes the group of upper triangular matrices in \(PSL(n,{\mathbb Z})\), then any free, mixing p.m.p. action of \(\Gamma = PSL(n,{\mathbb Z})*_{T_n} PSL(n,{\mathbb Z})\) is \(W^*\)-superrigid, i.e., any isomorphism between \(L^\infty (X)\rtimes \Gamma\) and an arbitrary group measure space factor \(L^\infty (Y)\rtimes \Lambda\), \(\Lambda\) is a subgroup of \(\Gamma\), comes from a conjugacy of the actions. It is proven that for many groups \(\Gamma\) in the family \(\mathcal G\), the Bernoulli actions of \(\Gamma\) are \(W^*\)-superrigid.