Conjugacy and dynamics in Thompson's groups. (Q2248888)

Given a presentation of a group \(G\) the conjugacy problem of \(G\) is the decision problem of determining if two given words represent conjugated elements of \(G\). In the present paper the authors give solutions for this problem in Thompson's groups \(F\), \(T\), and \(V\). Although, there have been several solutions to the conjugacy problem in \(F\) [e.g. \textit{V. Guba, M. Sapir}, Mem. Am. Math. Soc. 620 (1997; Zbl 0930.20033)] and in \(V\) [e.g. \textit{G. Higman}, ``Finitely presented infinite simple groups'', Notes on Pure Mathematics 8, The Australian National University Canberra (1974)] before, this not only seems to be the first solution for the conjugacy problem in \(T\) but also provides a unified algorithm for this three groups (which -- they claim -- might also work in other groups). The main tools the authors use to study elements in Thompson's group are strand diagrams. Introduced in the first author's PhD thesis, strand diagrams are generalizations of the standard tree-pair diagrams typically used to describe elements in Thompson's groups. Roughly speaking, a strand diagram is a braid, where twists are replaced by splits and merges. It turns out that two elements of \(F\), \(T\), or \(V\) are in the same conjugacy class if and only if the corresponding strand diagrams are equivalent (where the equivalence is depending on the actual group and can be checked algorithmically). The paper under review also contains a section dealing with the question how strand diagrams can be used to describe the dynamics of elements of \(F\).