Left-orderable groups that don't act on the line

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Publication:2516477



Abstract: We show that the group of germs at infinity of orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of R admits no action on the line. This gives an example of a left-orderable group of the same cardinality as Homeo+(R) that does not embed in Homeo+(R). As an application of our techniques, we construct a finitely generated group of germs that does not extend to Homeo+(R) and, separately, extend a theorem of E. Militon on homomorphisms between groups of homeomorphisms.


A group is left-orderable if it admits a total order that is invariant under left multiplication. Denote by \(\mathcal H_+(\mathbb R)\) the group of orientation-preserving homeomorphisms and by \(\mathcal G_\infty\) the group of equivalence classes of such homeomorphisms under the equivalence \(f\sim g\) if there is \(x\in\mathbb R\) such that \(f\upharpoonleft[x,\infty)=g\upharpoonleft[x,\infty)\). Both groups are left-orderable but there is no non-trivial homomorphism \(\mathcal G_\infty\to\mathcal H_+(\mathbb R)\). It is noted that \(\mathcal G_\infty\) has cardinalty \(\mathfrak c\). The techniques are applied to describe a finitely generated subgroup of \(\mathcal G_\infty\) admitting no extension to \(\mathcal H_+(\mathbb R)\) and to show that \(\mathcal G_\infty\) does not act on the circle.











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