Automorphisms and monomorphisms of direct products of virtually solvable minimax groups
Abstract
This paper studies automorphisms and monomorphisms of direct products of finitely generated virtually solvable minimax groups, a class containing all virtually polycyclic groups. Under an indecomposability assumption on the -algebraic hulls, we prove that every monomorphism of factorizes uniquely as , where sends each factor into a permuted factor with -isomorphic hull and is central and off-diagonal. Conversely, every such pair defines a monomorphism of , and is an automorphism if and only if is. This indecomposability assumption is sharp: we show it cannot be weakened to direct indecomposability of the factors. The proof proceeds in three steps: first by establishing the corresponding central mixing property for finite-dimensional Lie algebras and algebraic Lie algebras, then for connected linear algebraic groups, and finally by transferring these results to minimax groups via -algebraic hulls. This extends the previously known nilpotent case both from automorphisms to monomorphisms and from finitely generated torsion-free nilpotent groups to the broader class of finitely generated virtually solvable minimax groups. As applications, we characterize co-Hopfian direct products and derive formulas for Reidemeister numbers and Reidemeister spectra.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.24167,
title = {Automorphisms and monomorphisms of direct products of virtually solvable minimax groups},
author = {Jonas Deré and Ken Vandermeersch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.24167},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
v1: 34 pages. v2: 30 pages; simplified proofs, weaker assumption on the hulls, and new counterexamples demonstrating sharpness