Special cube complexes (Q2480852)

From the introduction: ``The purpose of this paper is to study nonpositively curved cube complexes whose fundamental groups embed in right-angled Artin groups.'' The authors characterize those cube complexes \(X\) admitting a local isometry to the standard cube complex of a right-angled Artin group in terms of four geometric properties of the hyperplanes in \(X\) and call such complexes \(X\) Artin-special (or \(A\)-special). The corresponding results considering rightangled Coxeter groups as target lead to a class of groups the authors call Coxeter-special (or \(C\)-special). In a second paper, the authors plan to show that certain large classes of groups satisfy these geometric conditions. For example, they claim that every finitely generated Coxeter group is virtually \(A\)-special and every hyperbolic arithmetic lattice of simple type is virtually \(A\)-special. A consequence of the local isometries is that special cube-complexes have linear fundamental groups and that quasiconvex subgroups of these fundamental groups are separable. Applying unpublished work of Droms, the authors conclude that special cube complexes have fundamental groups that are residually torsion free and residually nilpotent.