Grigorchuk-Gupta-Sidki groups as a source for Beauville surfaces (Q784902)

A finite group is said to be a Beauville group if it has two sets of generators \( \{x_1, y_1 \} \) and \( \{x_2, y_2 \} \) such that, the subset \( \Sigma_j \) of the group obtained as a union of the cyclic subgroups generated by all conjugates of \(x_j,\ y_j \) and \( x_jy_j \), \[ \Sigma_1 \cap \Sigma_2 = \{1 \}. \] The interest in this situation arises from [\textit{F. Catanese}, Am. J. Math. 122, No. 1, 1--44 (2000; Zbl 0983.14013)] where it is shown how to construct a surface from such a situation (called Beauville surface) with interesting properties such as the rigidity of the complex structure. F. Catanese [loc. cit.], among other things, classifies the abelian Beauville groups. There exists extensive literature on non-abelian Beauville groups, mainly nilpotent and \(p\)-groups, see the survey [\textit{G. A. Jones}, Fields Inst. Commun. 70, 205--225 (2014; Zbl 1329.20001)]. In this work, the authors consider the groups \(G\) known as Grigorchuk-Gupta-Sidki groups, already studied for their applications to other issues such as the general Burnside problem. They act on the regular \(p\)-adic rooted tree where \(p\) is an odd prime, an action that induces on them some normal subgroups \( st_G (n) \), \( n \in {\mathbb N} \), of finite index. The main result of this work is that the fact that the quotients of these groups \(G\) are Beauville groups is closely related to the periodicity of \(G\). To be precise, if \( G \) is not periodic, no quotient \( G / st_G (n) \) is a Beauville group, for every \( n \geq 1 \). If, on the other hand, the group is periodic, \( G / st_G (n) \) is a Beauville group for each \( n \geq 3 \), for \( p \geq 5 \) and \( n = 2 \), and more generally each such periodic group has only a finite number of quotients which are not Beauville groups.