On the length of polynomial automorphisms of the affine plane (Q1598164)

Let \(K\) be a field of characteristic \(0\) and \(\mathcal{GA}\) the group of \(K\)-automorphisms of the affine plane \(\mathbb A^2\) over \(K\). By the Jung and van der Kulk theorem each \(f\in \mathcal{GA}\) is a finite composition of affine and triangular automorphisms of \(\mathbb A^2\), i.e. \( f=\alpha_1\gamma_1 \dots \alpha_k\gamma_k\alpha_{k+1} \) where \(\alpha_i\) are affine (and we assume that they are not triangular) and \(\gamma_j\) are triangular (and not affine). We define the length \(l(f)\) of \(f\) to be \(k\) (it does not depend on the composition). The main result of the paper is that the map \(l:\mathcal{GA}\to\mathbb Z \) is lower semicontinuous, where \(\mathcal{GA}\) is endowed with the inductive topology when we represent \(\mathcal{GA}\) as \(\bigcup_{n\geq 1}\mathcal{GA}_{\leq n}\), where \(\mathcal{GA}_{\leq n}\) is the set of all automorphisms of \(\mathbb A^2\) of degree \(\deg f\leq n\) with the Zariski topology.