Bredon cohomological dimensions for groups acting on CAT(0)-spaces (Q902296)

This article is a study of the Bredon cohomological dimension and the geometrical dimension of discrete groups acting by isometries on a certain type of metric spaces, called CAT~\((0)\) spaces, which they assume to be separable complete and have finite topological dimension. They also suppose the orbits to be discrete. Hence they consider families \(\mathcal F\) of subgroups of such a discrete group \(G\), mainly those of finite and of virtually cyclic subgroups of \(G\), and exploit the corresponding Bredon cohomology \(\mathrm{cd}_{\mathcal F}(G)\) which one can use to analyse finiteness properties of a classifying space of \(G\). The results are summarised in two theorems, from which the authors deduce six corollaries. The first theorem asserts that, if \(G\) acts discretely and by isometries on a separable CAT \((0)\) space \(X\) of finite dimension and such that the fixed point sets \(X^H\) are nonempty for all subgroups \(H\in\mathcal F\), then the Bredon cohomological dimension \(\mathrm{cd}_{\mathcal F}(G)\) of \(G\) is bounded if, for each \(x\in X\), the ``\(\mathcal F\)-local'' Bredon cohomological dimension \(\mathrm{cd}_{\mathcal F\cap G_x}(G_x)\) is bounded. The second theorem gives an upper bound for the Bredon cohomological dimension of \(G\) with respect to the family of virtually cyclic subgroups of \(G\), assuming that \(G\) acts discretely by semi-simple isometries on a complete separable CAT \((0)\) space of finite topological dimension. From these two main results, the authors are able to give several bounds for the Bredon cohomological dimensions of \(G\), in terms of ``\(\mathcal F\)-local'' properties, with respect to either the family \(\mathcal F\) of finite subgroups, or that of virtually cyclic subgroups of \(G\) in some particular cases.