A taste of twisted Brin-Thompson groups

This note serves as a short and reader-friendly introduction to twisted Brin-Thompson groups, which were recently constructed by Belk and the author to provide a family of simple groups with a variety of interesting properties. Most notably, twisted Brin-Thompson groups can be used to show that every finitely generated group quasi-isometrically embeds as a subgroup of a finitely generated simple group. Another important application is a concrete construction of a family of simple groups with arbitrary finiteness length. In addition to giving a concise introduction to the groups and these applications, we also prove here a strengthening of one of the results from the original paper. Namely, we prove that any finitely presented group acting faithfully and oligomorphically on a set, with finitely generated stabilizers of finite subsets, embeds in a finitely presented simple group. We believe this could potentially lead to future progress on resolving the Boone-Higman Conjecture for certain groups.