On diagonal actions of branch groups and the corresponding characters

Abstract

We introduce notions of absolutely non-free and perfectly non-free group actions and use them to study the associated unitary representations. We show that every weakly branch group acts absolutely non-freely on the boundary of the associated rooted tree. Using this result and the symmetrized diagonal actions we construct for every countable branch group infinitely many different ergodic perfectly non-free actions, infinitely many II$_1$-factor representations, and infinitely many continuous ergodic invariant random subgroups.