A very short proof of Forester's rigidity result

Vincent Guirardel

Published 2003-01-24, updated 2003-05-22Version 3

The deformation space of a simplicial G-tree T is the set of G-trees which can be obtained from T by some collapse and expansion moves, or equivalently, which have the same elliptic subgroups as T. We give a short proof of a rigidity result by Forester which gives a sufficient condition for a deformation space to contain an Aut(G)-invariant G-tree. This gives a sufficient condition for a JSJ splitting to be invariant under automorphisms of G. More precisely, the theorem claims that a deformation space contains at most one strongly slide-free G-tree, where strongly slide-free means the following: whenever two edges e_1, e_2 incident on a same vertex v are such that G_{e_1} is a subset of G_{e_2}, then e_1 and e_2 are in the same orbit under G_v.