English

Co-Hopfianity is not a profinite property

Group Theory 2026-03-18 v2 Geometric Topology

Abstract

We exhibit two finitely generated residually finite groups GG and HH with isomorphic profinite completions G^H^\widehat{G} \cong \widehat{H}, such that GG is co-Hopfian while HH is not. The construction utilizes Wise's residually finite version of the Rips construction applied to a finitely presented acyclic group UU with trivial profinite completion and a strong universality property. A key feature of our approach is the construction of HH as a preimage subgroup of GG which is conjugate to a proper subgroup of itself. This renders the non-co-Hopfianity of HH immediate without requiring a detailed structural analysis of the Rips kernel.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.04197,
  title  = {Co-Hopfianity is not a profinite property},
  author = {Hyungryul Baik and Wonyong Jang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.04197},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages. Comments are welcome. We have corrected a minor error and added some references