The conjugacy classes of so-called special involutions parameterize the constituents of the action of a finite Coxeter group on the cohomology of the complement of its complexified hyperplane arrangement. In this note we give a short intrinsic characterisation of special involutions in terms of so-called bulky parabolic subgroups.
There is a well-known classification of conjugacy classes of involutions in finite Coxeter groups, in terms of subsets of nodes of their Coxeter graphs. In many cases, the product of an involution with the longest element is again an involution. We identify the conjugacy class of this product involution in terms of said classification.
We review the properties of the finite Coxeter groups which are most useful for applications to cohomological invariants, namely their classes of involutions and their "cubes" (abelian subgroups generated by reflections).
Commuting involution graphs have been studied for finite Coxeter groups and for affine groups of classical type. The purpose of this short note is to establish some general results for commuting involution graphs in affine Coxeter groups, and to deal with types $\tilde F_4$ and $\tilde G_2$. Types $\tilde E_6$ $\tilde E_7$ and $\tilde E_8$ are more substantial and we will address these in a forthcoming paper.
In this paper, given a split extension of an arbitrary Coxeter group by automorphisms of the Coxeter graph, we determine the involutions in that extension whose centralizer has finite index. Our result has applications to many problems such as the isomorphism problem of general Coxeter groups. In the argument, some properties of certain special elements and of the fixed-point subgroups by graph automorphisms in Coxeter groups, which are of independent interest, are also given.
We consider the question of determining whether a given group (especially one generated by involutions) is a right-angled Coxeter group. We describe a group invariant, the involution graph, and we characterize the involution graphs of right-angled Coxeter groups. We use this characterization to describe a process for constructing candidate right-angled Coxeter presentations for a given group or proving that one cannot exist. We provide some first applications. In addition, we provide an elementary proof of rigidity of the defining graph for a right-angled Coxeter group. We also recover a resul…
The excess of an element $w$ of a finite Coxeter group $W$ is the minimal value of $l(x) + l(y) - l(w)$, where $x$, $y$ are elements of $W$ such that $x^2 = y^2 = 1$ and $w = xy$. Every element of a finite Coxeter group is either an involution or the product of two involutions, so the concept of excess is well defined. It can be extended to strongly real classes of infinite Coxeter groups. Earlier work by the authors showed that every conjugacy class of a finite Coxeter group contains an element of minimal length and excess zero. The current paper shows that each conjugacy class also contains …
For $W$ a Coxeter group, let $\mathcal{W} = \{ w \in W \;| \; w = xy \; \mbox{where} \; x, y \in W \; \mbox{and} \; x^2 = 1 = y^2 \}$. If $W$ is finite, then it is well known that $W = \mathcal{W}$. Suppose that $w \in \mathcal{W}$. Then the minimum value of $\ell(x) + \ell(y) - \ell(w)$, where $x, y \in W$ with $w = xy$ and $x^2 = 1 = y^2$, is called the \textit{excess} of $w$ ($\ell$ is the length function of $W$). The main result established here is that $w$ is always $W$-conjugate to an element with excess equal to zero.
We describe an algorithm to identify a minimal set of "braid relations" which span and preserve all sets of involution words for twisted Coxeter systems of finite or affine type. We classify the cases in which adding the smallest possible set of "half-braid" relations to the ordinary braid relations produces a spanning set: in the untwisted case, this occurs for the Coxeter systems which are finite with rank two or type $A_n$, or affine with rank three or type $\tilde A_n$. These results generalize recent work of Hu and Zhang on the finite classical cases.
We consider both standard and twisted action of a (real) Coxeter group G on the complement M_G to the complexified reflection hyperplanes by combining the reflections with complex conjugation. We introduce a natural geometric class of special involutions in G and give explicit formulae which describe both actions on the total cohomology H(M_G,C) in terms of these involutions. As a corollary we prove that the corresponding twisted representation is regular only for the symmetric group S_n, the Weyl groups of type D_{2m+1}, E_6 and dihedral groups I_2 (2k+1) and that the standard action has no a…
In this paper we prove that $2^{20+1}.U_6(2)$, known as the centralizer of an involution in the group $2E_6(2)$ is a quotient of a Coxeter group. We obtain a presentation of $2^{20+1}.U_6(2)$ as a $Q_{222}$-group, which now resolve a long pending question.
In this paper we prove, without the finite rank assumption, that any irreducible Coxeter group of infinite order is directly indecomposable as an abstract group. The key ingredient of the proof is that we can determine, for an irreducible Coxeter group, the centralizers of the normal subgroups that are generated by involutions. As a consequence, we show that the problem of deciding whether two general Coxeter groups are isomorphic, as abstract groups, is reduced to the case of irreducible Coxeter groups, without assuming the finiteness of the number of the irreducible components or their ranks…
For a finite Coxeter group $W$ and $w$ an element of $W$ the `excess' of $w$ is defined to be $e(w) = \min\{\ell(x) + \ell(y) - \ell(w) \; | \; w=xy, \; x^2 = y^2 = 1\}$ where $\ell$ is the length function on $W$. Here we investigate the behaviour of $e(w)$, and a related concept reflection excess, when restricted to standard parabolic subgroups of $W$. Also the set of involutions inverting $w$ is studied.
Coxeter groups are a special class of groups generated by involutions. They play important roles in the various areas of mathematics. This survey particularly focuses on how one uses Coxeter groups to construct interesting examples of discrete subgroups of Lie groups.
This paper examines a systematic method to construct a pair of (inter-related) root systems for arbitrary Coxeter groups from a class of non-standard geometric representations. This method can be employed to construct generalizations of root systems for a large family of groups generated only by involutions. We then give a characterization of Coxeter groups, among these groups, in terms of such paired root systems. Furthermore, we use this method to construct and study the paired root systems for reflection subgroups of Coxeter groups.
The purpose of this article is to shed new light on the combinatorial structure of Kazhdan-Lusztig cells in infinite Coxeter groups $W$. Our main focus is the set $\D$ of distinguished involutions in $W$, which was introduced by Lusztig in one of his first papers on cells in affine Weyl groups. We conjecture that the set $\D$ has a simple recursive structure and can be enumerated algorithmically starting from the distinguished involutions of finite Coxeter groups. Moreover, to each element of $\D$ we assign an explicitly defined set of equivalence relations on $W$ that altogether conjecturally…
Let $(W,S)$ be a Coxeter system, let $G$ be a finite solvable group of automorphisms of $(W,S)$ and let $φ$ be a weight function which is invariant under $G$. Let $φ_G$ denote the weight function on $W^G$ obtained by restriction from $φ$. The aim of this paper is to compare the ${\mathbf{a}}$-function, the set of Duflo involutions and the Kazhdan-Lusztig cells associated to $(W,φ)$ and to $(W^G,φ_G)$, provided that Lusztig's Conjectures hold.
Based on the second author's thesis in this article we provide a uniform treatment of abstract involutions of algebraic groups and of Kac-Moody groups using twin buildings, RGD systems, and twisted involutions of Coxeter groups. Notably we simultaneously generalize the double coset decompositions established by Springer and by Helminck-Wang for algebraic groups and by Kac-Wang for certain Kac-Moody groups, we analyze the filtration studied by Devillers-Muhlherr in the context of arbitrary involutions, and we answer a structural question on the combinatorics of involutions of twin buildings rai…
We prove that a finite complex reflection group has a generalized involution model, as defined by Bump and Ginzburg, if and only if each of its irreducible factors is either $G(r,p,n)$ with $\gcd(p,n)=1$; $G(r,p,2)$ with $r/p$ odd; or $G_{23}$, the Coxeter group of type $H_3$. We additionally provide explicit formulas for all automorphisms of $G(r,p,n)$, and construct new Gelfand models for the groups $G(r,p,n)$ with $\gcd(p,n)=1$.
An element of a Coxeter group W is fully commutative if any two of its reduced decompositions are related by a series of transpositions of adjacent commuting generators. An element of a Coxeter group W is cyclically fully commutative if any of its cyclic shifts remains fully commutative. These elements were studied in Boothby et al.. In particular the authors enumerated cyclically fully commutative elements in all Coxeter groups having a finite number of them. In this work we characterize and enumerate cyclically fully commutative elements according to their Coxeter length in all finite or aff…
In this paper, we show that $σ$-involutions associated to extendable c=4/5 Virasoro vectors generate a 3-transposition group in the automorphism group of a vertex operator algebra (VOA). Several explicit examples related to lattice VOA are also discussed in details. In particular, we show that the automorphism group of the VOA $V_{K_{12}}^{\hatν}$ associated to the Coxeter Todd lattice $K_{12}$ contains a subgroup isomorphic to ${}^+Ω^{-}(8,3)$.
Let $(W,S)$ be a Coxeter system and $\ast$ be an automorphism of $W$ with order $\leq 2$ such that $s^{\ast}\in S$ for any $s\in S$. Let $I_{\ast}$ be the set of twisted involutions relative to $\ast$ in $W$. In this paper we consider the case when $\ast=\text{id}$ and study the braid $I_\ast$-transformations between the reduced $I_\ast$-expressions of involutions. If $W$ is the Weyl group of type $B_n$ or $D_n$, we explicitly describe a finite set of basic braid $I_\ast$-transformations for all $n$ simultaneously, and show that any two reduced $I_\ast$-expressions for a given involution can b…
A model for a finite group is a set of linear characters of subgroups that can be induced to obtain every irreducible character exactly once. A perfect model for a finite Coxeter group is a model in which the relevant subgroups are the quasiparabolic centralizers of perfect involutions. In prior work, we showed that perfect models give rise to interesting examples of $W$-graphs. Here, we classify which finite Coxeter groups have perfect models. Specifically, we prove that the irreducible finite Coxeter groups with perfect models are those of types $\mathsf{A}_{n}$, $\mathsf{B}_n$, $\mathsf{D}_…
We introduce a new statistic on the hyperoctahedral groups (Coxeter groups of type B), and give a conjectural formula for its signed distributions over arbitrary descent classes. The statistic is analogous to the classical Coxeter length function, and features a parity condition. For descent classes which are singletons the conjectured formula gives the Poincaré polynomials of the varieties of symmetric matrices of fixed rank. For several descent classes we prove the conjectural formula. For this we construct suitable "supporting sets" for the relevant generating functions. We prove cancellati…
We consider a generalization of the fundamental theorem of finitely generated abelian groups for some non-abelian groups, which is called OGS. First, we consider the dihedral group, which is a non-abelian extension of an abelian group by an involution. Then, we focus on a special case, where the abelian group is cyclic, which is the two-generated Coxeter group I{2}(m). We mention interesting connections between the reduced Coxeter presentation and a particular OGS canonical presentation, which we call the standard OGS canonical presentation. These connections motivate us to offer a generalizat…
The twin group $T_n$ is a right angled Coxeter group generated by $n-1$ involutions and the pure twin group $PT_n$ is the kernel of the natural surjection from $T_n$ onto the symmetric group on $n$ symbols. In this paper, we investigate some structural aspects of these groups. We derive a formula for the number of conjugacy classes of involutions in $T_n$, which quite interestingly, is related to the well-known Fibonacci sequence. We also derive a recursive formula for the number of $z$-classes of involutions in $T_n$. We give a new proof of the structure of $\Aut(T_n)$ for $n \ge 3$, and show…
Recently, Lusztig constructed for each reductive group a partition by unions of sheets of conjugacy classes, which is indexed by a subset of the set of conjugacy classes in the associated Weyl group. Sevostyanov subsequently used certain elements in each of these Weyl group conjugacy classes to construct strictly transverse slices to the conjugacy classes in these strata, generalising the classical Steinberg slice, and similar cross sections were built out of different Weyl group elements by He-Lusztig. In this paper we observe that He-Lusztig's and Sevostyanov's Weyl group elements share a ce…
The twin group $T_n$ is a right angled Coxeter group generated by $n- 1$ involutions and having only far commutativity relations. These groups can be thought of as planar analogues of Artin braid groups. In this note, we study some properties of twin groups whose analogues are well-known for Artin braid groups. We give an algorithm for two twins to be equivalent under individual Markov moves. Further, we show that twin groups $T_n$ have $R_\infty$-property and are not co-Hopfian for $n \ge 3$.
The twin group $T_n$ is a Coxeter group generated by $n-1$ involutions and the pure twin group $PT_n$ is the kernel of the natural surjection of $T_n$ onto the symmetric group on $n$ letters. In this paper, we investigate structural aspects of twin and pure twin groups. We prove that the twin group $T_n$ decomposes into a free product with amalgamation for $n>4$. It is shown that the pure twin group $PT_n$ is free for $n=3,4$, and not free for $n\ge 6$. We determine a generating set for $PT_n$, and give an upper bound for its rank. We also construct a natural faithful representation of $T_4$ i…