Higher cohomology of parabolic actions on certain homogeneous spaces

Abstract

We show that for a parabolic R^d-action on a compact quotient of PSL(2,R)^d, the cohomologies in degrees 1 through d-1 trivialize, and we give the obstructions to solving the degree-d coboundary equation, along with bounds on Sobolev norms of primitives. In previous papers we have established these results for certain Anosov systems. The present work extends the methods of those papers to systems that are not Anosov. The main new idea is in Section 4, where we define special elements of representation spaces that allow us to modify the arguments from the previous papers. In Section 7 we discuss how one may generalize this strategy to R^d-systems coming from a product of Lie groups, like in the systems we have here.