Quantifying lawlessness in finitely generated groups (Q6187037)

Let \(\Gamma\) be a group. A law for \(\Gamma\) is a non-trivial word map which vanishes identically on \(\Gamma\), the group \(\Gamma\) is lawless if it has no laws. Let \(S\) be a finite generating set of \(\Gamma\) and let \(w\) be a non-trivial reduced word which is not a law for \(\Gamma\). The complexity of \(w\) in \(\Gamma\) is the minimal length of a tuple in \(\Gamma\) not evaluating to the identity under \(w\) (where the length of a tuple of elements of \(\Gamma\) is the sum of the lengths of those elements in the word metric induced by \(S\)). The lawlessness growth function \(\mathcal{A}_{\Gamma}^{S}: \mathbb{N} \rightarrow \mathbb{N}\) sends \(n \in \mathbb{N}\) to the maximal complexity occurring among the words of length at most \(n\). In the paper under review, the author proves that \(\mathcal{A}_{\Gamma}\) is bounded if and only if \(\Gamma\) has a non-abelian free subgroup and he constructs, for any nondecreasing unbounded function \(f: \mathbb{N} \rightarrow \mathbb{N}\), an elementary amenable lawless group \(\Gamma\) for which \(\mathcal{A}_{\Gamma}\) grows more slowly than \(f\). Furthermore, he shows examples of torsion lawless groups \(\Gamma\) for which \(\mathcal{A}_{\Gamma}\) is at least linear using Golod-Shafarevich theory and he gives some upper bounds on \(\mathcal{A}_{\Gamma}\) for Grigorchuk's group and Thompson's group \(\mathbf{F}\).