Direct products, overlapping actions, and critical regularity

Abstract: We address the problem of computing the critical regularity of groups of homeomorphisms of the interval. Our main result is that if $H$ and $K$ are two non-solvable groups then a faithful $C^{1,\tau}$ action of $H\times K$ on a compact interval $I$ is {\em not overlapping} for all $\tau>0$, which by definition means that there must be non-trivial $h\in H$ and $k\in K$ with disjoint support. As a corollary we prove that the right-angled Artin group $(F_2\times F_2)\mathbb{Z}$ has critical regularity one, which is to say that it admits a faithful $C^1$ action on $I$, but no faithful $C^{1,\tau}$ action. This is the first explicit example of a group of exponential growth which is without nonabelian subexponential growth subgroups, whose critical regularity is finite, achieved, and known exactly. Another corollary we get is that Thompson's group $F$ does not admit a faithful $C^1$ overlapping action on $I$, so that $F\mathbb{Z}$ is a new example of a locally indicable group admitting no faithful $C^1$--action on $I$.