Structure and rigidity in hyperbolic groups. I (Q1329582)

This paper is on hyperbolic groups in the sense of Gromov. The authors introduce the notion of a Dehn twist automorphism of a group given as an amalgamated product or HNN extension. They call an automorphism obtained by a sequence of Dehn twists and inner automorphisms an internal automorphism. They prove that for a torsion-free hyperbolic group, the group of internal automorphisms is of finite index. They give a proof of a theorem of Gromov which asserts that if \(\Gamma\) is a hyperbolic group and \(\Gamma_ 1\) a finitely presented, torsion-free, freely indecomposable non-cyclic subgroup, then \(\Gamma\) contains at most finitely many conjugacy classes of subgroups isomorphic to \(\Gamma_ 1\). They obtain also the following results: If \(\Gamma\) is a hyperbolic group and \(\Gamma_ 1\) a finitely presented torsion-free, freely indecomposable subgroup which has a finitely generated normalizer in \(\Gamma\), then \(\Aut (\Gamma_ 1)\) is finitely generated. The automorphism group of a torsion-free hyperbolic group is finitely generated. The authors introduce ``weakly rigid groups'', a notion which they say will be important in the second author's approach to the study of the automorphism group of a free group. The paper has a short appendix which summarizes results (mainly due to the first author and to Bestvina and Feighn) on the theory of group actions on trees which is used in the paper.