The automorphism group of Thompson's group \(F\): subgroups and metric properties. (Q373500)

In this paper the authors study some natural subgroups of the automorphism group of Thompson's group \(F\), focusing particularly on their metric properties. Thompson's group \(F\) is a much-studied infinite group with a number of interesting properties. It can be defined in several ways, the most common being as a particular group of homeomorphisms of the unit interval. A standard technique when working with the group \(F\) is to represent each element of \(F\) by a pair of finite binary trees with the same number of leaves [see, for instance \textit{J. W. Cannon, W. J. Floyd} and \textit{W. R. Parry}, Enseign. Math., II. Sér. 42, No. 3-4, 215-256 (1996; Zbl 0880.20027)]. In this paper the authors show that a similar technique can be applied to \(\Aut^+(F)\), the set of orientation-preserving automorphisms of \(F\); in particular each element of \(\Aut^+(F)\) can be represented as a pair of marked infinite binary trees that are eventually periodic. The authors use this representation to prove their main result. To state this result we start with a result of \textit{M. G. Brin} [Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 84, 5-33 (1996; Zbl 0891.57037)], which asserts that there is a short exact sequence \(1\to F\to\Aut^+(F)\to T\times T\to 1\), where \(T\) is Thompson's group \(T\). The group \(T\) contains subgroups isomorphic to \(F\) and, by taking a `diagonal' subgroup isomorphic to \(F\) in \(T\times T\), one can use the given short exact sequence to construct a particular semi-direct product \(C:=F_x\rtimes F_w\) as a subgroup of \(\Aut^+(F)\). (Here both groups \(F_x\) and \(F_w\) are isomorphic to Thompson's group \(F\).) The groups \(F_x\) and \(F_w\) are naturally provided with a set of generators, \(F_x=\langle x_0,x_1\rangle\) and \(F_w=\langle w_0,w_1\rangle\), and so the same is true of \(C=\langle x_0,x_1,w_0,w_1\rangle\). This allows the authors to study the distortion of \(F_x\) and \(F_w\) in \(C\). (Given two finitely generated groups \(H<G\), the `distortion function' is defined to be \[ \delta(n)=\max\{|x|_H:x\in H\text{ and }|x|_G\leq n\}, \] where the value of \(|\cdot|\) is given by the respective word metric. The order of growth of the distortion function is independent of the choice of generating sets for \(H\) and \(G\).) Now the main theorem of the paper asserts that \(F_x\) is quadratically distorted in \(C\), whereas \(F_w\) is undistorted. The presence of a quadratically distorted subgroup in \(C\) isomorphic to \(F\) is of particular interest, as it represents different behaviour from the embeddings of \(F\) studied to this point.