Quasimorphisms on nonorientable surface diffeomorphism groups

Abstract

Bowden, Hensel, and Webb constructed infinitely many quasimorphisms on the diffeomorphism groups of orientable surfaces. In this paper, we extend their result to nonorientable surfaces. Namely, we prove that the space of nontrivial quasimorphisms $\widetilde{QH}({\mathrm{Diff}}_0(N_g))$ on the identity component of the diffeomorphism group ${\mathrm{Diff}}_0(N_g)$ on a closed nonorientable surface $N_g$ of genus $g\ge 3$ is infinite-dimensional. As a corollary, we obtain the unboundedness of the commutator length and the fragmentation length on ${\mathrm{Diff}}_0(N_g)$.

Revised to improve readability, 17 pages