Some new rigidity results for stable orbit equivalence

Broadly speaking, we prove that an action of a group with very little commutativity cannot be stably orbit equivalent to an action of a group with enough commutativity, assuming both actions are free and finite measure preserving. For example, one group may be SL²(ℝ) and the other a group with infinite discrete center (e.g., the universal cover of SL²(ℝ)); I believe this is the first rigidity result of this type for a pair of simpleLie groups both of split rank one. Another example: one group may be any nonelementary word hyperbolic group, the other any group with infinite discrete center.