No Arabic abstract
In this paper we study obstructions to presentability by products for finitely generated groups. Along the way we develop both the concept of acentral subgroups, and the relations between presentability by products on the one hand, and certain geometric and measure or orbit equivalence invariants of groups on the other. This leads to many new examples of groups not presentable by products, including all groups with infinitely many ends, the (outer) automorphism groups of free groups, Thompsons groups, and even some elementary amenable groups.
In various classes of infinite groups, we identify groups that are presentable by products, i.e. groups having finite index subgroups which are quotients of products of two commuting infinite subgroups. The classes we discuss here include groups of small virtual cohomological dimension and irreducible Zariski dense subgroups of appropriate algebraic groups. This leads to applications to groups of positive deficiency, to fundamental groups of three-manifolds and to Coxeter groups. For finitely generated groups presentable by products we discuss the problem of whether the factors in a presentation by products may be chosen to be finitely generated.
Sela proved every torsion-free one-ended hyperbolic group is coHopfian. We prove that there exist torsion-free one-ended hyperbolic groups that are not commensurably coHopfian. In particular, we show that the fundamental group of every simple surface amalgam is not commensurably coHopfian.
For oriented connected closed manifolds of the same dimension, there is a transitive relation: $M$ dominates $N$, or $M ge N$, if there exists a continuous map of non-zero degree from $M$ onto $N$. Section 1 is a reminder on the notion of degree (Brouwer, Hopf), Section 2 shows examples of domination and a first set of obstructions to domination due to Hopf, and Section 3 describes obstructions in terms of Gromovs simplicial volume. In Section 4 we address the particular question of when a given manifold can (or cannot) be dominated by a product. These considerations suggest a notion for groups (fundamental groups), due to D. Kotschick and C. Loh: a group is presentable by a product if it contains two infinite commuting subgroups which generate a subgroup of finite index. The last section shows a small sample of groups which are not presentable by products; examples include appropriate Coxeter groups.
The class of acylindrically hyperbolic groups, which are groups that admit a certain type of non-elementary action on a hyperbolic space, contains many interesting groups such as non-exceptional mapping class groups and $operatorname{Out}(mathbb F_n)$ for $ngeq 2$. In such a group, a generalized loxodromic element is one that is loxodromic for some acylindrical action of the group on a hyperbolic space. Osin asks whether every finitely generated group has an acylindrical action on a hyperbolic space for which all generalized loxodromic elements are loxodromic. We answer this question in the negative, using Dunwoodys example of an inaccessible group as a counterexample.
Given a group $G$ and a subset $X subset G$, an element $g in G$ is called quasi-positive if it is equal to a product of conjugates of elements in the semigroup generated by $X$. This notion is important in the context of braid groups, where it has been shown that the closure of quasi-positive braids coincides with the geometrically defined class of $mathbb{C}$-transverse links. We describe an algorithm that recognizes whether or not an element of a free group is quasi-positive with respect to a basis. Spherical cancellation diagrams over free groups are used to establish the validity of the algorithm and to determine the worst-case runtime.