Two periodicity conditions for spinal groups (Q6170754)

Spinal groups form a general family of groups acting on rooted trees, that include the well-studied constructions by Grigorchuk and by Gupta and Sidki from the 1980s. These constructions gave nice explicit examples of Burnside groups, i.e. infinite torsion finitely generated groups. Since then there have been few sufficient conditions determined for identifying further families of Burnside groups acting on rooted trees. This paper closes this gap by providing two sufficient conditions, in terms of certain dynamical systems, for a constant spinal group to be periodic. This leads to new examples of Burnside groups. The author further gives an example of a periodic constant spinal group that does not satisfy either of the given two conditions. The author further considers constant spinal groups that satisfy the second condition and shows that the Basilica group of such a group again satisfies the second condition. Here the Basilica group of a group is a new group constructed from the given group via a so-called Basilica operation, which delays the action of each generators to lower levels of the tree; compare [\textit{J.M. Petschick} et al., Groups Geom. Dyn. 17, No. 1, 331--384 (2023; Zbl 1511.20093].