Congruence subgroups and crystallographic quotients of small Coxeter groups (Q6177654)

The paper under review is mainly dedicated to the study of two classes of small Coxeter groups that arise as natural extensions of symmetric groups. For \(n \geq 2\), the symmetric group \(S_{n}=\langle \sigma_{1}, \ldots, \sigma_{n-1} \rangle\) has following defining relations: (i) \(\sigma_{i}^{2}\); (ii) \((\sigma_{i}\sigma_{i+1})^{3}\); (iii) \((\sigma_{i}\sigma_{j})^{2}\) if \(|i-j| \geq 2\). By omitting all relations of type (i), (ii) or (iii) one at a time from the preceding presentation, we obtain presentations of the braid group \(B_{n}\), the twin group \(T_{n}\) and the triplet group \(L_{n}\) respectively. It has been proved that the pure subgroups \(PT_{n}\) and \(PL_{n}\), which are kernels of natural surjections \(T_{n} \rightarrow S_{n}\) and \(L_{n} \rightarrow S_{n}\), respectively, have suitable hyperplane arrangements as their Eilenberg-MacLane spaces. Furthermore, twin and triplet groups have topological interpretations and can be thought of as real forms of braid groups. The main result proved by the authors is Theorem 3.8: An infinite small Coxeter group which is not virtually abelian does not have the congruence subgroup property. As a consequence, they deduce that the congruence subgroup property fails for both \(T_{n}\) and \(L_{n}\) when \(n \geq 4\). They also determine subquotients of principal congruence subgroups of \(T_{n}\), and identify the pure twin group \(PT_{n}\) and the pure triplet group \(PL_{n}\) with suitable principal congruence subgroups. Further, the authors investigate crystallographic quotients of these two families of small Coxeter groups, and prove that \(T_{n}/PT_{n}'\), \(T_{n}/T_{n}''\) and \(L_{n}/PL_{n}'\) are crystallographic groups and determine their crystallographic dimensions. In particular, they show the following two interesting results. Theorem 4.9: For \(n \geq 3\), there is a short exact sequence \[ 1 \rightarrow T_{n}'/T_{n}'' \rightarrow T_{n}/T_{n}'' \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}_{2}^{n-1} \rightarrow 1 \] such that \(T_{n}/T_{n}''\) is a crystallographic group of dimension \(2n-5\). Furthermore, \(T_{n}/T_{n}''\) is not a Bieberbach group and admits only 2-torsion. Theorem 4.12: For \(n \geq 4\), there is a short exact sequence \[ 1 \rightarrow PL_{n}/PL_{n}' \rightarrow L_{n}/PL_{n}'\rightarrow S_{n} \rightarrow 1 \] such that \(L_{n}/PL_{n}'\) is a crystallographic group of dimension \(1+n!(2n-7)/6\). Furthermore, \(L_{n}/PL_{n}'\) is not a Bieberbach group.