Groups with near exponential residual finiteness growth (Q1678491)

Residual finiteness growth measures how effectively finite groups approximate a given group. The article studies residual finiteness growth of branch groups. Here, branch groups are groups that act on rooted trees and have subnormal subgroup structure similar to that of the full automorphism group of the tree. A function \(\mathbb{N}\rightarrow \mathbb{N}\) is called near exponential if it is bounded above and below by functions of the form \(2^{n^c}\) for some positive constant \(c\). By first proving two stronger results, dealing with the lower and upper bound separately, the authors show that finitely generated regular-branch contracting groups have near exponential residual finiteness growth. They further show that the Gupta-Sidki \(p\)-groups, for \(p\) a prime at least 5, have super-exponential residual finiteness growth. This paper also gives an alternative proof that a finitely generated regular-branch group is not linear.