On the autonomous metric on the group of area-preserving diffeomorphisms of the 2-disc

Michael Brandenbursky, Jarek Kedra

Published 2012-07-03, updated 2013-02-27Version 3

Let $D^2$ be the open unit disc in the Euclidean plane and let $G:= Diff(D2; area)$ be the group of smooth compactly supported area-preserving diffeomorphisms of $D^2$. We investigate the properties of G endowed with the autonomous metric. In particular, we construct a bi-Lipschitz homomorphism $Z^k \rightarrow G$ of a finitely generated free abelian group of an arbitrary rank. We also show that the space of homogeneous quasi-morphisms vanishing on all autonomous diffeomorphisms in the above group is infinite dimensional.