Evanescent affine isometric actions and weak identity excluding groups
Résumé
We investiguate a property of affine isometric actions on Hilbert spaces called evanescence. Evanescent actions are the extreme opposite of irreducible actions. Every affine isometric action decomposes naturally into an evanescent part and an irreducible part. We study when this decomposition is unique. We also study when an action that has almost fixed points is automatically evanescent. We relate these questions to the identity excluding property for groups. We also relate them to the finiteness of the von Neumann algebras generated by the linear part of the action.