Instability of nondiscrete free subgroups in Lie groups (Q649068)

Finitely-generated nondiscrete free subgroups in Lie groups are studied with main emphasis on instability and freeness. It is shown that it is always possible to make an arbitrarily small perturbation of the generators of the free subgroup in such a way that the new group formed by the perturbed generators is not free. This result is generalized to certain nonfree subgroups. The main result of the paper is contained in the theorem: Let \(\pmb\Gamma\) be a finitely-generated free group of rank at least two, and \(G\) be a Lie group of positive dimension. Then every injective nondiscrete representation \(\pmb\rho\) : \(\pmb\Gamma \rightarrow G\) is the limit of a sequence of noninjective representations. The approximating noninjective representations may be chosen to have nonfree images. An upper bound of the best approximation rate is obtained. The optimal approximation rate is exponential in the minimal length of relation, while the upper bound is subexponential.