We study uniform exponential growth of groups acting on CAT(0) cube complexes. We show that groups acting without global fixed points on CAT(0) square complexes either have uniform exponential growth or stabilize a Euclidean subcomplex. This generalizes the work of Kar and Sageev considers free actions. Our result lets us show uniform exponential growth for certain groups that act improperly on CAT(0) square complexes, namely, finitely generated subgroups of the Higman group and triangle-free Artin groups. We also obtain that non-virtually abelian groups acting freely on CAT(0) cube complexes of any dimension with isolated flats that admit a geometric group action have uniform exponential growth.
We discuss a problem posed by Gersten: Is every automatic group which does not contain Z+Z subgroup, hyperbolic? To study this question, we define the notion of n-tracks of length n, which is a structure like Z+Z, and prove its existence in the non-hyperbolic automatic groups with mild conditions. As an application, we show that if a group acts effectively, cellularly, properly discontinuously and cocompactly on a CAT(0) cube complex and its quotient is weakly special, then the above question is answered affirmatively.
In this paper we start the inquiry into proving uniform exponential growth in the context of groups acting on CAT(0) cube complexes. We address free group actions on CAT(0) square complexes and prove a more general statement. This says that if $F$ is a finite collection of hyperbolic automorphisms of a CAT(0) square complex $X$, then either there exists a pair of words of length at most 10 in $F$ which freely generate a free semigroup, or all elements of $F$ stabilize a flat (of dimension 1 or 2 in $X$). As a corollary, we obtain a lower bound for the growth constant, $sqrt[10]{2}$, which is uniform not just for a given group acting freely on a given CAT(0) cube complex, but for all groups which are not virtually abelian and have a free action on a CAT(0) square complex.
We provide a necessary and sufficient condition on a finite flag simplicial complex, L, for which there exists a unique CAT(0) cube complex whose vertex links are all isomorphic to L. We then find new examples of such CAT(0) cube complexes and prove that their automorphism groups are virtually simple. The latter uses a result, which we prove in the appendix, about the simplicity of certain subgroups of the automorphism group of a rank-one CAT(0) cube complex. This result generalizes previous results by Tits and by Haglund and Paulin.
Let $G$ be a group acting properly and essentially on an irreducible, non-Euclidean finite dimensional CAT(0) cube complex $X$ without fixed points at infinity. We show that for any finite collection of simultaneously inessential subgroups ${H_1, ldots, H_k}$ in $G$, there exists an element $g$ of infinite order such that $forall i$, $langle H_i, grangle cong H_i * langle grangle$. We apply this to show that any group, acting faithfully and geometrically on a non-Euclidean possibly reducible CAT(0) cube complex, has property $P_{naive}$ i.e. given any finite list ${g_1, ldots, g_k}$ of elements from $G$, there exists $g$ of infinite order such that $forall i$, $langle g_i, grangle cong langle g_i rangle *langle grangle$. This applies in particular to the Burger-Moses simple groups that arise as lattices in products of trees. The arguments utilize the action of the group on its Poisson boundary and moreover, allow us to summarise equivalent conditions for the reduced $C^*$-algebra of the group to be simple.
We give several sufficient conditions for uniform exponential growth in the setting of virtually torsion-free hierarchically hyperbolic groups. For example, any hierarchically hyperbolic group that is also acylindrically hyperbolic has uniform exponential growth. In addition, we provide a quasi-isometric characterizations of hierarchically hyperbolic groups without uniform exponential growth. To achieve this, we gain new insights on the structure of certain classes of hierarchically hyperbolic groups. Our methods give a new unified proof of uniform exponential growth for several examples of groups with notions of non-positive curvature. In particular, we obtain the first proof of uniform exponential growth for certain groups that act geometrically on CAT(0) cubical groups of dimension 3 or more. Under additional hypotheses, we show that a quantitative Tits alternative holds for hierarchically hyperbolic groups.