Structure and automorphisms of pure virtual twin groups (Q6049533)

Since at least the late 1970s, notions of ``planar drawings of closed curves'' (popularly known as doodles) have been mathematically formalised [\textit{R. Fenn} and \textit{P. Taylor}, Lect. Notes Math. 722, 37--43 (1979; Zbl 0409.57003)]. Much like a knot (or link) group is the fundamental group of the complement space of a knot (or link), the so-called twin group is the analogous version of such object in the context of doodles, more generally drawn on closed oriented surfaces. (\textit{M. Khovanov}'s influential paper [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 349, No. 6, 2297--2315 (1997; Zbl 0869.57001)] still serves as a good introduction to the topic.) As knots and links were later generalised to virtual knots and links, the same is done for twin groups and their pure variants (`pure' here means taking the kernel of the obvious map from a twin group onto the corresponding symmetric group, as one does with braids), cf. Section 5 of [\textit{V. Bardakov} et al., Geom. Dedicata 203, 135--154 (2019; Zbl 1454.20080)]. To do so, one doubles the number of generators of a twin group, adding commutator relations where indices of generators are far apart, and some extra relations of length six regarding successive (original) generators and the new generators with same indices. The paper under review drops the topological interpretations and focuses on the algebra of virtual twin groups and their pure variants, i.e., structural results about such objects. Among other things, explicit finite presentations of pure twin groups are given (Theorem 3.3), from which it is obvious that they form a special subclass of right-angled Artin groups (RAAGs). From this, several other algebraic properties are immediate (such as virtual twin groups being linear) or straightforward to deduce using standard techniques for RAAGs (e.g., a description of the automorphism group of a virtual pure twin group, worked out in Section 5). Along the way, the authors also note that pure virtual twin groups of rank \(\geq 3\) have infinitely many \(\varphi\)-conjugacy classes for any automorphism \(\varphi\) (Theorem 5.8), which is also immediate from their description as RAAGs and known results. While the paper under review works out some computations in detail and the text and proofs are well-structured, there are no surprising results (from a group-theoretic perspective). It is unclear to the reviewer which properties (pure) virtual twin groups enjoy that might set them apart as interesting objects within the class of right-angled Artin groups. Hopefully future works will bring some curious remarks about (pure) virtual twin groups.