The conjugacy problem and virtually cyclic subgroups in the Artin braid group quotient \(B_n/[P_{n},P_{n}]\) (Q2661716)

Let \(B_{n}\) and \(P_{n}\) be the full and pure Artin braid groups on \(n\) strands, respectively. Moreover, let \([P_{n},P_{n}]\) denote the commutator subgroup of \(P_{n}\), lastly, let \(G_{n}=B_{n}/[P_{n},P_{n}]\). The Authors study the conjugacy problem in \(G_{n}\) for \(n\geq 3\). They give necessary and sufficient conditions for a pair of words in \(G_{n}\) to be conjugate. The conditions are explicit in terms of the expression as a product of the usual generators \(\{ A_{i,j}\mid 1\leq i<j\leq n\}\) of \(P_{n}\) and is given by solving integral equations on the exponents of the expressions of the words by the generators. The second problem is the realization of virtually cyclic groups inside \(G_{n}\). It known that there is no 2-torsion in \(G_{n}\), therefore the infinite virtually cyclic subgroups that may appear are of the form of semi-direct products \(F\rtimes_{\alpha}\mathbb{Z}\) where, \(F\) is a finite group and \(\alpha\) denotes the action of \(\mathbb{Z}\) on \(F\) by some automorphism. The main result in this direction is Theorem 1.3. \textsl{ Let \(p\leq n\) be an odd prime and \(n\geq 3\). The group \(C_{p}\rtimes_{\alpha_{k}}\mathbb{Z}\) can be realized as a subgroup of \(G_{n}\) for \(k=1,\ldots ,p-1\) where \(\alpha_{k}(\lambda)=\lambda^{k}\) for \(C_{p}=\langle \lambda\rangle\), the cyclic group of order \(p\).} The authors give several examples of the applications of their algorithm to solve the conjugacy problem in \(G_{n}\).