No Arabic abstract
We continue our programme of extending key techniques from geometric group theory to semigroup theory, by studying monoids acting by isometric embeddings on spaces equipped with asymmetric, partially-defined distance functions. The canonical example of such an action is a cancellative monoid acting by translation on its Cayley graph. Our main result is an extension of the Svarc-Milnor Lemma to this setting.
A subgroup $H$ of a group $G$ is confined if the $G$-orbit of $H$ under conjugation is bounded away from the trivial subgroup in the space $operatorname{Sub}(G)$ of subgroups of $G$. We prove a commutator lemma for confined subgroups. For groups of homeomorphisms, this provides the exact analogue for confined subgroups (hence in particular for URSs) of the classical commutator lemma for normal subgroups: if $G$ is a group of homeomorphisms of a Hausdorff space $X$ and $H$ is a confined subgroup of $G$, then $H$ contains the derived subgroup of the rigid stabilizer of some open subset of $X$. We apply this commutator lemma to the study of URSs and actions on compact spaces of groups acting on rooted trees. We prove a theorem describing the structure of URSs of weakly branch groups and of their non-topologically free minimal actions. Among the applications of these results, we show: 1) if $G$ is a finitely generated branch group, the $G$-action on $partial T$ has the smallest possible orbital growth among all faithful $G$-actions; 2) if $G$ is a finitely generated branch group, then every embedding from $G$ into a group of homeomorphisms of strongly bounded type (e.g. a bounded automaton group) must be spatially realized; 3) if $G$ is a finitely generated weakly branch group, then $G$ does not embed into the group IET of interval exchange transformations.
We study a class of inverse monoids of the form M = Inv< X | w=1 >, where the single relator w has a combinatorial property that we call sparse. For a sparse word w, we prove that the word problem for M is decidable. We also show that the set of words in (X cup X^{-1})^* that represent the identity in M is a deterministic context free language, and that the set of geodesics in the Schutzenberger graph of the identity of M is a regular language.
In this paper we introduce and study some geometric objects associated to Artin monoids. The Deligne complex for an Artin group is a cube complex that was introduced by the second author and Davis (1995) to study the K(pi,1) conjecture for these groups. Using a notion of Artin monoid cosets, we construct a version of the Deligne complex for Artin monoids. We show that for any Artin monoid this cube complex is contractible. Furthermore, we study the embedding of the monoid Deligne complex into the Deligne complex for the corresponding Artin group. We show that for any Artin group this is a locally isometric embedding. In the case of FC-type Artin groups this result can be strengthened to a globally isometric embedding, and it follows that the monoid Deligne complex is CAT(0) and its image in the Deligne complex is convex. We also consider the Cayley graph of an Artin group, and investigate properties of the subgraph spanned by elements of the Artin monoid. Our final results show that for a finite type Artin group, the monoid Cayley graph embeds isometrically, but not quasi-convexly, into the group Cayley graph.
We observe that Whiteheads lemma is an immediate consequence of Stallings folds.
This paper is devoted to the construction of norm-preserving maps between bounded cohomology groups. For a graph of groups with amenable edge groups we construct an isometric embedding of the direct sum of the bounded cohomology of the vertex groups in the bounded cohomology of the fundamental group of the graph of groups. With a similar technique we prove that if (X,Y) is a pair of CW-complexes and the fundamental group of each connected component of Y is amenable, the isomorphism between the relative bounded cohomology of (X,Y) and the bounded cohomology of X in degree at least 2 is isometric. As an application we provide easy and self-contained proofs of Gromov Equivalence Theorem and of the additivity of the simplicial volume with respect to gluings along pi_1-injective boundary components with amenable fundamental group.