Barycentric straightening and bounded cohomology

Abstract

We study the barycentric straightening of simplices in irreducible symmetric spaces of non-compact type. We show that, for an n-dimensional symmetric space of rank r>1, the p-Jacobian has uniformly bounded norm, as soon as p is at least n-r+2. As a consequence, for a non-compact, connected, semisimple real Lie group G, in degrees n-r+2 and higher, every cohomology class has a bounded representative. This answers Dupont's problem in small codimension. We also give examples of symmetric spaces where the barycentrically straightened simplices of dimension n-r have unbounded volume, showing that the range in which we obtain boundedness of the p-Jacobian is very close to optimal.