The complexity of conjugacy, orbit equivalence, and von Neumann equivalence of actions of nonamenable groups

Abstract

Building on work of Popa, Ioana, and Epstein--Törnquist, we show that, for every nonamenable countable discrete group Γ, the relations of conjugacy, orbit equivalence, and von Neumann equivalence of free ergodic (or weak mixing) measure preserving actions of Γ on the standard atomless probability space are not Borel, thus answering questions of Kechris. This is an optimal and definitive result, which establishes a neat dichotomy with the amenable case, since any two free ergodic actions of an amenable group on the standard atomless probability space are orbit equivalent by classical results of Dye and Ornstein--Weiss. The statement about conjugacy solves the nonamenable case of Halmos' conjugacy problem in Ergodic Theory, originally posed by Halmos in 1956 for ergodic transformations. In order to obtain these results, we study ergodic (or weak mixing) class-bijective extensions of a given ergodic countable probability measure preserving equivalence relation R. When R is nonamenable, we show that the relations of isomorphism and von Neumann equivalence of extensions of R are not Borel. When R is amenable, all the extensions of R are again amenable, and hence isomorphic by classical results of Dye and Connes--Feldman--Weiss. This approach allows us to extend the results about group actions mentioned above to the case of nonamenable locally compact unimodular groups, via the study of their cross-section equivalence relations.