Geodesic growth in virtually abelian groups (Q2659140)

Let \(G\) be a group generated as a monoid by a finite weighted set \(S\), where each \(s \in S\) has a positive integer weight \(\omega(s) \in \mathbb{N}\setminus \{0\}\). Let \(S^{\ast}\) be the set of all words in the letters of \(S\), and \(\overline{\sigma} \in G\) the group element corresponding to \(\sigma \in S^{\ast}\). The weight of \(\sigma= \sigma_{1}\sigma_{2} \ldots \sigma_{k} \in S^{\ast}\) is \(\omega(\sigma)=\sum_{i=1}^{k} \omega(\sigma_{i})\) and the word length \(| \sigma |_{S}\) of \(\sigma\) is \(k\). The weighted length of \(g \in G\) is \(\ell_{\omega}(g)=\min \{\omega(\sigma) \mid \overline{\sigma}=g, \sigma \in S^{\ast}\}\). A word \(\sigma \in S^{\ast}\) is a geodesic if it represents \(\overline{\sigma}\) with minimal weight, that is, \(\omega(\sigma) = \ell_{\omega}(\overline{\sigma})\). The \textit{geodesic growth function} \(\gamma_{S} : \mathbb{N} \rightarrow \mathbb{N}\) counts the geodesic words with weight at most \(n\). A group \(G\) has \textit{polynomial geodesic growth} (with respect to \(S\)) if there are constants \(\beta, d \in \mathbb{N} \setminus \{0\}\) such that \(\gamma_{S}(n) \leq \beta \cdot n^{d}\) for each \(n > 0\) and \textit{exponential geodesic growth} if there is a constant \(\alpha \in \mathbb{R}\) with \(\alpha > 1\) such that \(\gamma_{S}(n)\leq \alpha^{n}\) for each \(n \geq 0\). The geodesic growth series of \(G\) is the power series \(f_{S}(z) = \sum_{n=0}^{\infty} \gamma_{S}(n)z^{n}\). In the paper under review, the author proves that the geodesic growth function of any finitely generated virtually abelian group is either polynomial or exponential and that the geodesic growth series is holonomic, and rational in the polynomial growth case. Furthermore, he proves that the language of geodesics is blind multicounter (for a precise definition see the paper).