Surface subgroups of Coxeter and Artin groups. (Q1434769)

The authors show that a 1-ended word hyperbolic Coxeter group contains a hyperbolic surface group as a corollary to their main result, a characterization of virtually free Coxeter groups. This answers, for Coxeter groups, a question attributed to Gromov published on the cited homepage of Mladen Bestvina. Partial results of corresponding problems for Artin groups are given and several interesting related open problems posed.