Fundamental groups and group presentations with bounded relator lengths (Q6540609)

The paper under review is dedicated to the study of the geometry of compact geodesic spaces with trivial first Betti number admitting large finite groups of isometries. The main result is Theorem 2: Let \(X\) be a compact geodesic space and \(G \leq \mathrm{Iso}(X)\) a finite group of isometries. If the first Betti number \(b_{1}(X)\) vanishes, then\N\[\N\frac{\mathrm{diam}(X)}{\mathrm{diam}(X/G)} \leq 4 \sqrt{|G|}.\N\]\NLet \(G\) be a group with a finite symmetric generating set \(S\) and let \(P_{k}(\Gamma(G, S))\) be 2-dimensional \(\mathsf{CW}\)-complex whose 1-skeleton is the Cayley graph \(\Gamma\) of \(G\) with respect to \(S\) and whose \(2\)-cells are \(m\)-gons for \(0\leq m \leq k\), defined by the simple graph loops of length \(m\) in \(\Gamma\), up to cyclic permutations.\N\NAnother interesting result is Theorem 6: Let \(k\geq 3\), \(G\) be a finite group, and \(S \subset G\) a finite symmetric set of generators for which \(P_{k}(\Gamma (G, S))\) has trivial first Betti number. Then \(\mathrm{diam}(\Gamma(G,S)) \leq \big(\sqrt{4|G|+1}-2 \big) \lfloor (k+2)/3 \rfloor\). Moreover, the author shows that the first nontrivial eigenvalue \(-\lambda_{1}\) of the Laplacian on the Cayley graph satisfies \(\lambda_{1} \geq 2-2 \cos(2\pi/k)\).