Affine actions on non-archimedean trees

We initiate the study of affine actions of groups on $\Lambda$-trees for a general ordered abelian group $\Lambda$; these are actions by dilations rather than isometries. This gives a common generalisation of isometric action on a $\Lambda$-tree, and affine action on an $\R$-tree as studied by I. Liousse. The duality between based length functions and actions on $\Lambda$-trees is generalised to this setting. We are led to consider a new class of groups: those that admit a free affine action on a $\Lambda$-tree for some $\Lambda$. Examples of such groups are presented, including soluble Baumslag-Solitar groups and the discrete Heisenberg group.Comment: 27 pages. Section 1.4 expanded, typos corrected from previous versio

Simplicity of some twin tree automorphism groups with trivial commutation relations

We prove simplicity for incomplete rank 2 Kac-Moody groups over algebraic closures of finite fields with trivial commutation relations between root groups corresponding to prenilpotent pairs. We don't use the (yet unknown) simplicity of the corresponding finitely generated groups (i.e., when the ground field is finite). Nevertheless we use the fact that the latter groups are just infinite (modulo center).Comment: 10 page

Group-theoretic compactification of Bruhat-Tits buildings

Let GF denote the rational points of a semisimple group G over a non-archimedean local field F, with Bruhat-Tits building X. This paper contains five main results. We prove a convergence theorem for sequences of parahoric subgroups of GF in the Chabauty topology, which enables to compactify the vertices of X. We obtain a structure theorem showing that the Bruhat-Tits buildings of the Levi factors all lie in the boundary of the compactification. Then we obtain an identification theorem with the polyhedral compactification (previously defined in analogy with the case of symmetric spaces). We finally prove two parametrization theorems extending the BruhatTits dictionary between maximal compact subgroups and vertices of X: one is about Zariski connected amenable subgroups, and the other is about subgroups with distal adjoint action