On the cubical geometry of Higman's group

DOI10.1215/00127094-3715913zbMATH Open1402.20054arXiv1506.02837OpenAlexW3102546777MaRDI QIDQ523409FDOQ523409

Alexandre Martin

Publication date: 20 April 2017

Published in: Duke Mathematical Journal (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We investigate the cocompact action of Higman's group on a CAT(0) square complex associated to its standard presentation. We show that this action is in a sense intrinsic, which allows for the use of geometric techniques to study the endomorphisms of the group, and show striking similarities with mapping class groups of hyperbolic surfaces, outer automorphism groups of free groups and linear groups over the integers. We compute explicitly the automorphism group and outer automorphism group of Higman's group, and show that the group is both hopfian and co-hopfian. We actually prove a stronger rigidity result about the endomorphisms of Higman's group: Every non-trivial morphism from the group to itself is an automorphism. We also study the geometry of the action and prove a surprising result: Although the CAT(0) square complex acted upon contains uncountably many flats, the Higman group does not contain subgroups isomorphic to Z^2. Finally, we show that this action possesses features reminiscent of negative curvature, which we use to prove a refined version of the Tits alternative for Higman's group.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02837

Recommendations

• One-dimensional actions of Higman's group
• Non-hyperbolic automatic groups and groups acting on CAT(0) cube complexes.
• scientific article
• Groups acting on CAT(0) square complexes
• Semi-simple actions of the Higman-Thompson groups \(T_n\) on finite-dimensional CAT(0) spaces

zbMATH Keywords

automorphism groupTits alternativeco-Hopfian groupsHopfian groups\(\operatorname{CAT}(0)\) cube complexesHigman group

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Automorphism groups of groups (20F28) Geometric group theory (20F65) Hyperbolic groups and nonpositively curved groups (20F67) Topological methods in group theory (57M07)

Cited In (10)

• Groups acting on CAT(0) cube complexes with uniform exponential growth
• Contact graphs, boundaries and a central limit theorem for CAT(0) cubical complexes
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Acylindrical actions on CAT(0) square complexes
• CAT(0) cube complexes are determined by their boundary cross ratio
• Acylindrical hyperbolicity and existential closedness
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• CAT(0) cube complexes and inner amenability
• Automorphisms of large-type free-of-infinity Artin groups
• Automatic continuity for groups whose torsion subgroups are small

This page was built for publication: On the cubical geometry of Higman's group

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q523409)