Second bounded cohomology of groups acting on 1-manifolds and applications to spectrum problems (Q6110350)

The comprehensive paper under review centers around two intricately related invariants of groups, namely, stable commutator length and bounded cohomology. Bounded cohomology of groups is defined analogously to usual cohomology of groups, but considering the topological dual of the simplicial resolution instead of the algebraic dual. The authors prove a general criterion for the vanishing of second bounded cohomology with trivial real coefficients for groups that admit an action satisfying some mild hypotheses. This gives new computations of the second bounded cohomology for a large class of groups of homeomorphisms of 1-manifolds, along with many interesting applications. \par As one of their main results, the authors prove that the finitely presented nonamenable group \(G_0\) constructed by \textit{Y. Lodha} and \textit{J. T. Moore} [Groups Geom. Dyn. 10, No. 1, 177--200 (2016; Zbl 1336.43001)] satisfies the property that every subgroup has vanishing second bounded cohomology. This provides the first solution to a homological version of the von Neumann-Day problem, posed by Calegari, which asks whether there exist nonamenable groups, all of whose subgroups have vanishing second bounded cohomology with trivial real coefficients. The authors also show the existence of finitely generated non-indicable left orderable groups with vanishing second bounded cohomology, thereby answering a question of \textit{A. Navas} [in: Proceedings of the international congress of mathematicians 2018, ICM 2018, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 1--9, 2018. Volume III. Invited lectures. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific; Rio de Janeiro: Sociedade Brasileira de Matemática (SBM). 2035--2062 (2018; Zbl 1451.37039)]. Further, they provide the first examples of finitely presented groups whose spectrum of stable commutator length contains algebraic irrationals, answering a question of Calegari. From a topological and geometrical viewpoint, the authors provide the first examples of manifolds whose simplicial volumes are algebraic and irrational, as further evidence towards a conjecture of Heuer and Loh.