INVARIANT RIGID GEOMETRIC STRUCTURES AND SMOOTH PROJECTIVE FACTORS

We consider actions of non-compact simple Lie groups preserving an analytic rigid geometric structure of algebraic type on a compact manifold. The structure is not assumed to be unimodular, so an invariant measure may not exist. Ergodic stationary measures always exist, and when such a measure has full support, we show the following: 1. Either the manifold admits a smooth equivariant map onto a homogeneous projective variety, defined on an open dense conull invariant set, or the Lie algebra of the Zariski closure of the Gromov representation of the fundamental group contains a Lie subalgebra isomorphic to the Lie algebra of the acting group. As a corollary, a smooth non-trivial homogeneous projective factor does exist whenever the fundamental group of M admits only virtually solvable linear representations, and thus in particular when M is simply connected, regardless of the real rank. 2. There exist explicit examples showing that analytic rigid actions of certain simple real rank one groups may indeed fail to have a smooth projective factor. 3. It is possible to generalize Gromov's theorem on the algebraic hull of the representation of the fundamental group of the manifold to the case of rigid non-unimodular structures, again for actions of groups of any real rank. An important ingredient in the proofs is a generalization of Gromov's centralizer theorem beyond the case of invariant measures.