By a recent result obtained by R. Howlett and the author considerable progress has been made towards a complete solution of the isomorphism problem for Coxeter groups. In this paper we give a survey on the isomorphism problem and explain in particular how the result mentioned above reduces it to its `reflection preserving' version. Furthermore we desrcibe recent developments concerning the solution of the latter.
In this paper we describe a family of isomorphism invariants of a finitely generated Coxeter group W. Each of these invariants is the isomorphism type of a quotient group W/N of W by a characteristic subgroup N. The virtue of these invariants is that W/N is also a Coxeter group. For some of these invariants, the isomorphism problem of W/N is solved and so we obtain isomorphism invariants that can be effectively used to distinguish isomorphism types of finitely generated Coxeter groups.
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…
A solution of the isomorphism problem is presented for the class of Coxeter groups W that have a finite set of Coxeter generators S such that the underlying graph of the presentation diagram of the system (W,S) has the property that every cycle of length at least four has a cord. As an application, we construct counterexamples to two main conjectures concerning the isomorphism problem for Coxeter groups.
We consider presentations that were derived in \cite{BaumeisterNeaimeRees} for the interval groups associated with proper quasi-Coxeter elements of the Coxeter group $W(D_n)$. We use combinatorial methods to derive alternative presentations for the groups, and use these new presentations to show that the interval group associated with a proper quasi-Coxeter element of $W(D_n)$ cannot be isomorphic to the Artin group of type $D_n$. While the specific problems we solve arise from the study of interval groups, their solution provides an illustration of how techniques indicated by computational ob…
Let $W$ be a Coxeter group and $r\in W$ a reflection. If the group of order 2 generated by $r$ is the intersection of all the maximal finite subgroups of $W$ that contain it, then any isomorphism from $W$ to a Coxeter group $W'$ must take $r$ to a reflection in $W'$. The aim of this paper is to show how to determine, by inspection of the Coxeter graph, the intersection of the maximal finite sugroups containing $r$. In particular we show that the condition above is satisfied whenever $W$ is infinite and irreducible, and has the property that all rank two parabolic subgroups are finite. So in th…
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.
The isomorphism problem for Coxeter groups has been reduced to its 'reflection preserving version' by B. Howlett and the second author. Thus, in order to solve it, it suffices to determine for a given Coxeter system (W,R) all Coxeter generating sets S of W which are contained in R^W, the set of reflections of (W,R). In this paper, we provide a further reduction: it suffices to determine all Coxeter generating sets S in R^W which are sharp-angled with respect to R.
This paper studies the rigidity properties of the abstract commensurator of the outer automorphism group of a universal Coxeter group of rank $n$, which is the free product $W_n$ of $n$ copies of $\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z}$. We prove that for $n\geq 5$ the natural map $\mathrm{Out}(W_n) \to \mathrm{Comm}(\mathrm{Out}(W_n))$ is an isomorphism and that every isomorphism between finite index subgroups of $\mathrm{Out}(W_n)$ is given by a conjugation by an element of $\mathrm{Out}(W_n)$.
We prove that two angle-compatible Coxeter generating sets of a given finitely generated Coxeter group are conjugate provided one of them does not admit any elementary twist. This confirms a basic case of a general conjecture which describes a potential solution to the isomorphism problem for Coxeter groups.
We show that for a large class $\mathcal{W}$ of Coxeter groups the following holds: Given a group $W_Γ$ in $\mathcal{W}$, the automorphism group ${\rm Aut}(W_Γ)$ virtually surjects onto some infinite Coxeter group. In particular, the group ${\rm Aut}(W_Γ)$ is virtually indicable and therefore does not have Kazhdan's property (T).
In this paper, we show that any Coxeter graph which defines a higher rank Coxeter group must have disjoint induced subgraphs each of which defines a hyperbolic or higher rank Coxeter group. We then use this result to demonstrate several classes of Coxeter graphs which define hyperbolic Coxeter groups.
We consider the class of those Coxeter groups for which removing from the Cayley graph any tubular neighbourhood of any wall leaves exactly two connected components. We call these Coxeter groups bipolar. They include both the virtually Poincare duality Coxeter groups and the infinite irreducible 2-spherical ones. We show in a geometric way that a bipolar Coxeter group admits a unique conjugacy class of Coxeter generating sets. Moreover, we provide a characterisation of bipolar Coxeter groups in terms of the associated Coxeter diagram.
H.S.M. Coxeter showed that a group $Γ$ is a finite reflection group of an Euclidean space if and only if $Γ$ is a finite Coxeter group. In this paper, we define {\it reflections} of geodesic spaces in general, and we prove that $Γ$ is a cocompact discrete reflection group of some geodesic space if and only if $Γ$ is a Coxeter group.
We prove that even Coxeter groups, whose Coxeter diagrams contain no (4,4,2) triangles, are conjugacy separable. In particular, this applies to all right-angled Coxeter groups or word hyperbolic even Coxeter groups. For an arbitrary Coxeter group W, we also study the relationship between Coxeter generating sets that give rise to the same collection of parabolic subgroups. As an application we show that if an automorphism of W preserves the conjugacy class of every sufficiently short element then it is inner. We then derive consequences for the outer automorphism groups of Coxeter groups.
Let W be an irreducible finitely generated Coxeter group. The geometric representation of W in GL(V) provides a discrete embedding in the orthogonal group of the Tits form (the associated bilinear form of the Coxeter group). If the Tits form of the Coxeter group is non-positive and non-degenerate, the Coxeter group does not contain any finite index subgroup isomorphic to an irreducible lattice in a semisimple group of R-rank greater or equal to 2.
We derive presentations of the interval groups related to all quasi-Coxeter elements in the Coxeter group of type $D_n$. Type $D_n$ is the only infinite family of finite Coxeter groups that admits proper quasi-Coxeter elements. The presentations we obtain are over a set of generators in bijection with what we call a Carter generating set, and the relations are those defined by the related Carter diagram together with a twisted or a cycle commutator relator, depending on whether the quasi-Coxeter element is a Coxeter element or not. The proof is based on the description of two combinatorial tec…
We use probabilistic methods to prove that many Coxeter groups are incoherent. In particular, this holds for Coxeter groups of uniform exponent > 2 with sufficiently many generators.
We show that the standard generating set of a Coxeter group is of minimal cardinality provided that the non-diagonal entries of the Coxeter matrix are sufficiently large.
A Coxeter system is an ordered pair (W,S) where S is the generating set in a particular type of presentation for the Coxeter group W. A subgroup of W is called special if it is generated by a subset of S. Amalgamated product decompositions of a Coxeter group having special factors and special amalgamated subgroup are easily recognized from the presentation of the Coxeter group. If a Coxeter group is a subgroup of the fundamental group of a given graph of groups, then the Coxeter group is also the fundamental group of a graph of special subgroups, where each vertex and edge group is a subgroup …
In this paper, we consider the automorphism groups of the Cayley graph with respect to the Coxeter generators and the Davis complex of an arbitrary Coxeter group. We determine for which Coxeter groups these automorphism groups are discrete. In the case where they are discrete, we express them as semidirect products of two obvious families of automorphisms. This extends a result of Haglund and Paulin.
We attach with every finite, involutive, nondegenerate set-theoretic solution of the Yang--Baxter equation a finite group that plays for the associated structure group the role that a finite Coxeter group plays for the associated Artin--Tits group.
We prove that Coxeter groups are biautomatic. From our construction of the biautomatic structure it follows that uniform lattices in isometry groups of buildings are biautomatic.
We establish quasi-isometric rigidity for a class of right-angled Coxeter groups. Let $Γ_1,Γ_2$ be joins of finite generalized thick $m$-gons with $m\geq 3$. We show that the corresponding right-angled Coxeter groups are quasi-isometric if and only if $Γ_1,Γ_2$ are isomorphic. We also give a construction of commensurable right-angled Coxeter groups.
It is an open question whether right-angled Coxeter groups have unique group-equivariant visual boundaries. Croke and Kleiner present a right-angled Artin group with more than one visual boundary. In this paper we present a right-angled Coxeter group with non-unique equivariant visual boundary. The main theorem is that if right-angled Coxeter groups act geometrically on a Croke-Kleiner spaces, then the local angles in those spaces all have to be right angles. We present a specific right-angled Coxeter group with non-unique equivariant visual boundary. However, we conjecture that the right an- …
If $A_Γ$ ($W_Γ$) is the Artin (Coxeter) group with defining graph $Γ$ we denote by $Sim(Γ)$ the number of vertices of the largest clique in $Γ$. We show that $asdimA_Γ\leq Sim(Γ)$, if $Sim(Γ)=2$. We conjecture that the inequality holds for every Artin group. We prove that if for all free of infinity Artin (Coxeter) groups the conjecture holds, then it holds for all Artin (Coxeter) groups. As a corollary, we show that $asdimW_Γ\leq Sim(Γ)$ for all Coxeter groups, which is the best known upper bound for the asymptotic dimension of Coxeter Groups. As a further corollary, we show that the asymptot…
In this article we calculate the minimal faithful permutation degree for all of the irreducible Coxeter groups. We also exhibit new examples of finite groups that possess a quotient whose minimal degree is strictly greater than that of the group.
We prove that a non-spherical irreducible Coxeter group is (directly) indecomposable and that a non-spherical and non-affine Coxeter group is strongly indecomposable in the sense that all its finite index subgroups are (directly) indecomposable. We prove that a Coxeter group has a decomposition as a direct product of indecomposable groups, and that such a decomposition is unique up to a central automorphism and a permutation of the factors. We prove that a Coxeter group has a virtual decomposition as a direct product of strongly indecomposable groups, and that such a decomposition is unique up…
An odd Coxeter group $W$ is one which admits a Coxeter system $(W,S)$ for which all the exponents $m_{ij}$ are either odd or infinity. The paper investigates the family of odd Coxeter groups whose associated labeled graphs $\mathcal{V}_{(W,S)}$ are trees. It is known that two Coxeter groups in this family are isomorphic if and only if they admit Coxeter systems having the same rank and the same multiset of finite exponents. In particular, each group in this family is isomorphic to a group that admits a Coxeter system whose associated labeled graph is a star shaped tree. We give the complete de…
We compute Aut(W) for any even Coxeter group whose Coxeter diagram is connected, contains no edges labeled 2, and cannot be separated into more than 2 connected components by removing a single vertex. The description is given explicitly in terms of the given presentation for the Coxeter group and admits an easy characterization of those groups W for which Out(W) is finite.
In 2011 Eriko Hironaka introduced an interesting generalization of Coxeter groups, motivated by studying certain mapping classes. The generalization is by labeling the vertices of a Coxeter graph either by +1 or by -1, and then generalizing the standard geometric representation of the associated Coxeter group by concerning the labels of the vertices. The group which Hironaka get by that generalization is called mixed-sign Coxeter group. In this paper we classify the simply-laced mixed-sign Coxeter groups where the associated graph is either a line or a simple cycle. We show that all the defini…
We provide involutory symmetric generating sets of finitely generated Coxeter groups, fulfilling a suitable finiteness condition, which in particular is fulfilled in the finite, affine and compact hyperbolic cases.
In this article, we study the manifold structure and the relatively hyperbolic structure of right-angled Coxeter groups with planar nerves. We then apply our results to the quasi-isometry problem for this class of right-angled Coxeter groups.
Let $W$ be a Coxeter group. We provide a precise description of the conjugacy classes in $W$, in the spirit of Matsumoto's theorem. This extends to all Coxeter groups an important result on finite Coxeter groups by M. Geck and G. Pfeiffer from 1993. In particular, we describe the cyclically reduced elements of $W$, thereby proving a conjecture of A. Cohen from 1994.
The aim of this note is to show that the cycle decomposition of elements of the symmetric group admits a quite natural formulation in the framework of dual Coxeter theory, yielding a generalization of it to the family of so-called parabolic quasi-Coxeter elements of Coxeter groups (in the symmetric group every element is a parabolic quasi-Coxeter element). We show that such an element admits an analogue of the cycle decomposition. Elements which are not in this family still admit a generalized cycle decomposition, but it is not unique in general.
We show that right-angled Coxeter groups are relatively hyperbolic in the sense defined by Farb, relative to a natural collection of rank-2 parabolic subgroups.
A conjecture of Gröbner-Shirshov basis of any Coxeter group has proposed by L.A. Bokut and L.-S. Shiao \cite{bs01}. In this paper, we give an example to show that the conjecture is not true in general. We list all possible nontrivial inclusion compositions when we deal with the general cases of the Coxeter groups. We give a Gröbner-Shirshov basis of a Coxeter group which is without nontrivial inclusion compositions mentioned the above.
In this paper, we show that the center of every Coxeter group is finite and isomorphic to $(\Z_2)^n$ for some $n\ge 0$. Moreover, for a Coxeter system $(W,S)$, we prove that $Z(W)=Z(W_{S\setminus\tilde{S}})$ and $Z(W_{\tilde{S}})=1$, where $Z(W)$ is the center of the Coxeter group $W$ and $\tilde{S}$ is the subset of $S$ such that the parabolic subgroup $W_{\tilde{S}}$ is the {\it essential parabolic subgroup} of $(W,S)$ (i.e.\ $W_{\tilde{S}}$ is the minimum parabolic subgroup of finite index in $(W,S)$). The finiteness of the center of a Coxeter group implies that a splitting theorem holds fo…
The following results are proved: The center of any finite index subgroup of an irreducible, infinite, non-affine Coxeter group is trivial; Any finite index subgroup of an irreducible, infinite, non-affine Coxeter group cannot be expressed as a product of two nontrivial subgroups. These two theorems imply a unique decomposition theorem for a class of Coxeter groups. We also obtain that the orbit of each element other than the identity under the conjugation action in an irreducible, infinite, non-affine Coxeter group is an infinite set. This implies that an irreducible, infinite Coxeter group i…
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn（波恩大学）；Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf（杜塞尔多夫大学）；University of Münster（明斯特大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
We show that every Coxeter group that is not virtually abelian and for which all labels in the corresponding Coxeter graph are powers of 2 or infinity can be mapped onto uncountably many infinite 2-groups which, in addition, may be chosen to be just-infinite, branch groups of intermediate growth. Also we answer affirmatively a question raised by Wiegold in Kourovka Notebook.
In this sixth part we study rank $3$ reflection groups not well generated: $G(2r,r,2)$, $G_{12}$, $G_{13}$ and $G_{22}$. We start from a reflection representation of a rank $3$ Coxeter group and we show that we can obtain in this manner affine Coxeter groups whose linear part is one of the preceding groups.
