The profinite completion of accessible groups (Q6048986)

If \(G\) is a finitely generated residually finite group, the genus \(\mathfrak{g}(G)\) of \(G\) the set of isomorphism classes of finitely generated residually finite groups having the same set of finite quotients as \(G\). Equivalently, \(\mathfrak{g}(G)\) is the set of isomorphism classes of finitely generated residually finite groups having profinite completion isomorphic to the profinite completion \(\widehat{G}\) of \(G\). The authors use the same term genus for the cardinality \(g(G)\) of \(\mathfrak{g}(G)\) (in the reviewer's opinion the same name should never be used for two different entities). A group \(G\) is called accessible if there exists a natural number \(n(G)\) such that, for any splitting of \(G\) as the fundamental group \(\pi_{1}(\mathcal{G},\Gamma)\) of a reduced graph of groups \((\mathcal{G},\Gamma)\) with finite edge groups, the size of \(\Gamma\) is bounded by \(n(G)\). Let \(\mathcal{A}\) be the class of finitely generated residually finite accessible groups \(G\) such that if \(G\) splits as an amalgamated free product \(G=G_{1} \ast_{H} G_{2}\) or an \(\mathrm{HNN}\)-extension \(G=\mathrm{HNN}(G_{1},H,t)\) over a finite group \(H\), then \(G_{i}\in \mathcal{A}\) and if \(G \in \mathcal{A}\) is one-ended, then \(\widehat{G}\) cannot act on a profinite tree (for a precise definition of profinite tree see Definition 2.2 in the paper) with finite edge stabilizers without a global fixed point. In this paper, the authors study the profinite genus of groups within this family \(\mathcal{A}\). They prove that the profinite completion of groups in \(\mathcal{A}\) almost detects its \(\mathrm{JSJ}\)-decomposition and compute the genus of free products of groups in \(\mathcal{A}\). In particular, if \(G_{1},G_{2} \in \mathcal{A}\), then \(g(G_{1}\ast G_{2})=g(G_{1}) \cdot g(G_{2})\) (see Theorem 1.3). The reviewer complains that in the paper the symbol \(g(G,\mathcal{A})\) is never explicitly defined.