No Arabic abstract
In contrast to being automatic, being Cayley automatic emph{a priori} has no geometric consequences. Specifically, Cayley graphs of automatic groups enjoy a fellow traveler property. Here we study a distance function introduced by the first author and Trakuldit which aims to measure how far a Cayley automatic group is from being automatic, in terms of how badly the Cayley graph fails the fellow traveler property. The first author and Trakuldit showed that if it fails by at most a constant amount, then the group is in fact automatic. In this article we show that for a large class of non-automatic Cayley automatic groups this function is bounded below by a linear function in a precise sense defined herein. In fact, for all Cayley automatic groups which have super-quadratic Dehn function, or which are not finitely presented, we can construct a non-decreasing function which (1) depends only on the group and (2) bounds from below the distance function for any Cayley automatic structure on the group.
We extend work of the first author and Khoussainov to show that being Cayley automatic is closed under taking the restricted wreath product with a virtually infinite cyclic group. This adds to the list of known examples of Cayley automatic groups.
We obtain a complete classification of graph products of finite abelian groups whose Cayley graphs with respect to the standard presentations are planar.
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.
The purpose of this survey is to describe how locally compact groups can be studied as geometric objects. We will emphasize the main ideas and skip or just sketch most proofs, often referring the reader to our much more detailed book arXiv:1403.3796
We generalize the notion of a graph automatic group introduced by Kharlampovich, Khoussainov and Miasnikov (arXiv:1107.3645) by replacing the regular languages in their definition with more powerful language classes. For a fixed language class $mathcal C$, we call the resulting groups $mathcal C$-graph automatic. We prove that the class of $mathcal C$-graph automatic groups is closed under change of generating set, direct and free product for certain classes $mathcal C$. We show that for quasi-realtime counter-graph automatic groups where normal forms have length that is linear in the geodesic length, there is an algorithm to compute normal forms (and therefore solve the word problem) in polynomial time. The class of quasi-realtime counter-graph automatic groups includes all Baumslag-Solitar groups, and the free group of countably infinite rank. Context-sensitive-graph automatic groups are shown to be a very large class, which encompasses, for example, groups with unsolvable conjugacy problem, the Grigorchuk group, and Thompsons groups $F,T$ and $V$.