Let (X,μ) be a standard probability space and Γ a countable group acting on X in a measure preserving way. The partition of the space X into Γ-orbits is entirely encoded by the full group of the action, consisting of all the Borel bijections of X which act by permutation on every orbit. To be more precise, Dye’s reconstruction theorem states that two measure preserving actions are orbit equivalent (i.e. they induce the same partition up to a measure preserving bijection of (X, μ)) if and only if their full groups are isomorphic.The reconstruction theorem is the main motivation for this thesis, in which we try to understand how exactly orbit equivalence invariants of measure preserving actions translate into algebraic or topological properties of the associated full group.The main result deals with the topological rank of full groups, that is the minimal number of elements needed to generate a dense subgroup. It happens to be deeply linked to a fundamental invariant of orbit equivalence : the cost. To be more precise, we have shown that the topological rank is, in the ergodic case, equal to the integer part of the cost of the action plus one. The non-ergodic case was also treated, and we obtained some genericity results for the set of topological generators.We also obtained a characterization of the measure preserving actions having only infinite orbits : these are the ones whose full group has non nontrivial morphism into Z/2Z.
