Rigidity of commuting affine actions on reflexive Banach spaces

Abstract

We give a simple argument to show that if α is an affine isometric action of a product G x H of topological groups on a reflexive Banach space X with linear part π, then either π(H) fixes a unit vector or α|G almost fixes a point on X. It follows that any affine isometric action of an abelian group on a reflexive Banach space X, whose linear part fixes no unit vectors, almost fixes points on X.