Freely braided elements in Coxeter groups. II. (Q1883391)

[For part I, cf. the authors, Ann. Comb. 6, No. 3-4, 337-348 (2002; Zbl 1052.20028).] Let \(W\) be a simply-laced Coxeter group with distinguished generators \(S=\{s_i\mid i\in I\}\) and Coxeter matrix \((m_{ij})_{i,j\in I}\). Let \(w\in W\). Any subset \(\Phi(w)\) of the form \(\{\alpha,\beta,\alpha+\beta\}\) will be called an `inversion triple' of \(w\). We say that an inversion triple \(T\) of \(w\) is `contractible' if there is a root sequence for \(w\) in which the elements of \(T\) appear consecutively (in some order). The number of contractible inversion triples of \(w\) will be denoted by \(N(w)\). If the contractible inversion triples of \(w\) are pairwise disjoint, then \(w\) is said to be `freely braided'. Given any \(i,j\in I\) and any nonnegative integer \(n\), we write \((i,j)_n\) for the word \(iji\cdots\) of length \(n\). Let \(\mathbf{i,j}\) be words and let \(i,j\in I\) with \(m_{ij}\neq 1\). We call the substitution \({\mathbf i}(i,j)_{m_{ij}}{\mathbf j}\to{\mathbf i}(j,i)_{m_{ji}}{\mathbf j}\) a `braid move', qualifying it `short' or `long' according as \(m_{ij}\) equals \(2\) or \(3\). We say that two words are `commutation equivalent' if one can be transformed into the other by a sequence of short braid moves. The set of words that are commutation equivalent to a given word is called the `commutation class' of that word. If the set of reduced expressions for an element \(w\in W\) forms a single commutation class, then we call \(w\) `fully commutative'. The main results obtained by the authors are the following. If \(w\in W\) has \(2^{N(w)}\) commutation classes, then \(w\) is freely braided. A simply-laced Coxeter group \(W\) has finitely many freely braided elements if and only if it has finitely many fully commutative elements.