Sofic groups were defined implicitly by Gromov and explicitly by Weiss. All residually finite groups (and hence all linear groups) are sofic. The purpose of this paper is to introduce, for every countable sofic group G G , a family of measure-conjugacy invariants for measure-preserving G G -actions on probability spaces. These invariants generalize Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy for actions of amenable groups. They are computed exactly for Bernoulli shifts over G G , leading to a complete classification of Bernoulli systems up to measure-conjugacy for many groups, including all countable linear groups. Recent rigidity results of Y. Kida and S. Popa are utilized to classify Bernoulli shifts over mapping class groups and property (T) groups up to orbit equivalence and von Neumann equivalence, respectively.

This paper introduces a new measure-conjugacy invariant for actions of free groups. Using this invariant, it is shown that two Bernoulli shifts over a finitely generated free group are measurably conjugate if and only if their base measures have the same entropy. This answers a question of Ornstein and Weiss.

Abstract. Previous work introduced two measure-conjugacy invariants: the f -invariant (for actions of free groups) and †-entropy (for actions of sofic groups). The purpose of this paper is to show that the f -invariant is essentially a special case of †-entropy. There are two applications: the f -invariant is invariant under group automorphisms and there is a uniform lower bound on the f -invariant of a factor in terms of the original system. Mathematics Subject Classification (2010). 37A35.

The von Neumann-Day problem asks whether every non-amenable group contains a non-abelian free group. It was answered in the negative by Ol'shanskii in the 1980s. The measurable version (formulated by Gaboriau-Lyons) asks whether every non-amenable measured equivalence relation contains a non-amenable treeable subequivalence relation. This paper obtains a positive answer in the case of arbitrary Bernoulli shifts over a non-amenable group, extending work of Gaboriau-Lyons. The proof uses an approximation to the random interlacement process by random multisets of geometrically-killed random walk paths. There are two applications: (1) the Gaboriau-Lyons problem for actions with positive Rokhlin entropy admits a positive solution, (2) for any non-amenable group, all Bernoulli shifts factor onto each other.