Groups of tree automorphisms as diffeological groups

Abstract

We consider certain groups of tree automorphisms as so-called diffeological groups. The notion of diffeology, due to Souriau, allows to endow non-manifold topological spaces, such as regular trees that we look at, with a kind of a differentiable structure that in many ways is close to that of a smooth manifold; a suitable notion of a diffeological group follows. We first study the question of what kind of a diffeological structure is the most natural to put on a regular tree in a way that the underlying topology be the standard one of the tree. We then proceed to consider the group of all automorphisms of the tree as a diffeological space, with respect to the functional diffeology, showing that this diffeology is actually the discrete one, the fact that therefore is true for its subgroups as well.