CONTRACTIBILITYOFDEFORMATIONSPACESOFG.PDFVIP

CONTRACTIBILITY OF DEFORMATION SPACES OF G-TREES MATT CLAY Abstract. Forester has defined spaces of simplicial tree actions for a finitely generated group, called deformation spaces. Culler and Vogtmann’s Outer space is an example of a deformation space. Using ideas from Skora’s proof of the contractibility of Outer space, we show that under some mild hypotheses deformation spaces are contractible. Culler and Vogtmann’s Outer space is a good geometric model for Out(F ), the outer automor- n phism group of a finitely generated free group of rank n ≥ 2, for three reasons: 1. Outer space is contractible; 2. point stabilizers are finite; and 3. there is a equivariant deformation retract on which the action is cocompact [4]. Outer space is the analog of Teichm¨uller space for a mapping class group of a closed negatively curved surface or of a symmetric space for an arithmetic group. See [1] and [12] for a survey of some results about Out(F ) obtained from using this connection between the three classes of n groups. Also see [2] for some open questions about the similarities and differences. Recall that Outer space is the moduli space of free actions of a free group on a simplicial tree. Forester has defined a generalization of Outer space for an arbitrary finitely generated group G [5]. The generalization allows actions which are not free but requires the subgroups with fixed points to be the same among all actions in the moduli space. Unfortunately these spaces are not Out(G)-invariant in general. Nevertheless, in the cases when the space is invariant under Ou