Formal conjugacy growth in graph products. I (Q6039652)

Let \(G\) be a group generated by a finite inverse-closed set \(X\). The reduced length \(\ell(g)\) of an element \(g \in G\) is the length of the shortest word in \(X\) representing \(g\). The length up to conjugacy is defined as \(\ell_{c}(g)=\min \{ \ell(g^{t}) \mid t \in g\}\) and this is also the definition of the length of the conjugacy class \(g^{G}\). If \(c_{G}(r)\) is the number of conjugacy classes of length \(r\), then the conjugacy growth series of \(G\) is \(f(z)=\sum_{r=0}^{\infty} c_{G}(r)z^{r}\). In this paper, the authors give a recursive formula for the conjugacy growth series of a graph product of groups in terms of the conjugacy growth and standard growth series of subgraph products. They also prove that the conjugacy and standard growth rates in a graph product are equal provided that this property holds for each vertex group. All results are obtained for the standard generating set consisting of the union of generating sets of the vertex groups.