Free products of sofic groups with amalgamation over monotileably amenable groups

We show that free products of sofic groups with amalgamation over monotileably amenable subgroups are sofic. Consequently, so are HNN extensions of sofic groups relative to homomorphisms of monotileably amenable subgroups. We also show that families of independent uniformly distributed permutation matrices and certain families of non-random permutation matrices (essentially, those coming from quasi--actions of a sofic group) are asymptotically *-free as the matrix size grows without bound.Comment: 16 pages. Version 2 has a shorter proof of Lemma 2.2, thanks to Ion Nechita. Version 3 corrects a mistake. The previous Lemma 3.1 was incorrect. Version 3 has a new proof of the main result, but it is (apparently) weaker than in Version 2. Note that the paper's title also changed accordingly. Version 4 corrects a minor mistake around equation (4

Groups acting on trees with almost prescribed local action

We investigate a family of groups acting on a regular tree, defined by prescribing the local action almost everywhere. We study lattices in these groups and give examples of compactly generated simple groups of finite asymptotic dimension (actually one) not containing lattices. We also obtain examples of simple groups with simple lattices, and we prove the existence of (infinitely many) finitely generated simple groups of asymptotic dimension one. We also prove various properties of these groups, including the existence of a proper action on a CAT(0) cube complex.Comment: v2: 35 pages; argument slightly modified in 4.2.2; final versio

Random permutation matrices under the generalized Ewens measure

We consider a generalization of the Ewens measure for the symmetric group, calculating moments of the characteristic polynomial and similar multiplicative statistics. In addition, we study the asymptotic behavior of linear statistics (such as the trace of a permutation matrix or of a wreath product) under this new measure.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AAP862 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org