Characterising actions on trees yielding non-trivial quasimorphisms

Abstract

Using a cocycle defined by Monod and Shalom (J Differential Geom 67(3):395–455, 2004) we introduce the median quasimorphisms for groups acting on trees. Then we characterise actions on trees that give rise to non-trivial median quasimorphisms. Roughly speaking, either the action is highly transitive on geodesics, or it fixes a point in the boundary, or there exists an infinite family of non-trivial median quasimorphisms. In particular, in the last case the second bounded cohomology of the group is infinite dimensional as a vector space. As an application, we show that a cocompact lattice in the automorphism group of a product of trees has only trivial quasimorphisms if and only if the closures of the projections on each of the two factors are locally $$\infty $$ -transitive.