Some ergodic and rigidity properties of discrete Heisenberg group actions

The goal of this paper is to study ergodic and rigidity properties of smooth actions of the discrete Heisenberg group $\H$. We establish the decomposition of the tangent space of any $C^\infty$ compact Riemannian manifold $M$ for Lyapunov exponents, and show that all Lyapunov exponents for the center elements are zero. We obtain that if an $\H$ group action contains an Anosov element, then under certain conditions on the element, the center elements are of finite order. In particular there is no faithful codimensional one Anosov Heisenberg group action on any manifolds, and no faithful codimensional two Anosov Heisenberg group action on tori. In addition, we show smooth local rigidity for higher rank ergodic $\H$ actions by toral automorphisms, using a generalization of the KAM (Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser) iterative scheme.