A Universal Construction for Groups Acting Freely on Real Trees

The theory of R-trees is a well-established and important area of geometric group theory and in this book the authors introduce a construction that provides a new perspective on group actions on R-trees. They construct a group RF(G), equipped with an action on an R-tree, whose elements are certain functions from a compact real interval to the group G. They also study the structure of RF(G), including a detailed description of centralizers of elements and an investigation of its subgroups an...