Abelian splittings and JSJ-decompositions of finitely presented Bestvina-Brady groups (Q6110518)

Right-angled Artin groups were first introduced in the 1970's by A. Baudisch and further developed in the 1980's by C. Droms under the name ``graph groups''. These groups are also known as partially commutative groups. Right-angled Artin groups have a lot of applications in algebra and abroad. Recently, these groups have attracted much interest in geometric group theory due to their actions on \(\mathrm{CAT}(0)\) cube complexes. One of the key subgroups of the right-angled Artin \(A_{\Gamma}\) defined by the graph \(\Gamma\) is the so called Bestvina-Brady group \(BB_{\Gamma}=\ker(\varphi)\) where \(\varphi:A_{\Gamma}\to \mathbb{Z}\) is the homomorphism which send all generators of \(A_{\Gamma}\) to \(1\). These groups have an important connection to topology. There are Bestvina-Brady groups that are counterexamples to either the Eilenberg-Ganea conjecture or the Whitehead conjecture. The paper under review is devoted to the study of structural properties of the group \(BB_{\Gamma}=\ker(\varphi)\). The main result of the paper is the following theorem. {Theorem.} Let \(\Gamma\) be a finite simplicial connected graph such that the flag complex on \(\Gamma\) is simply connected. Then the group \(BB_{\Gamma}\) splits over an abelian subgroup if and only if \(\Gamma\) satisfies one of the following conditions: \begin{itemize} \item[1.] \(\Gamma\) has a cut-vertex; \item[2.] \(\Gamma\) is a complete graph; \item[3.] \(\Gamma\) has a separating clique \(K_n\) for \(n\geq 2\). \end{itemize}