Groups of PL-homeomorphisms admitting non-trivial invariant characters

Abstract

We show that several classes of groups G of PL-homeomorphisms of the real line admit non-trivial homomorphisms from G to the additive group of reals that are fixed by every automorphism of G. The classes of groups enjoying the stated property include the generalisations of Thompson's group F studied by K. S. Brown, M. Stein, S. Cleary, and Bieri-Strebel but also the class of groups investigated by Bieri-Neumann-Strebel in [BNS87, Theorem 8.1]. It follows that every automorphism of a group in one of these classes has infinitely many associated twisted conjugacy classes.