English

Conjugacy languages and conjugacy growth relative to subsets of groups

Group Theory 2025-11-19 v2

Abstract

In this paper, we explore conjugacy languages when the base problem is the generalized conjugacy problem (with constraints): given gGg\in G and UGU\subset G, does gg have a conjugate in UU (with conjugators in a certain subset)? To do so, for subsets U,VGU,V\subseteq G, we define the corresponding languages ConjGeo(U,V)\text{ConjGeo(U,V)}, CycGeo(U)\text{CycGeo(U)}, ConjSL(U)\text{ConjSL(U)} and ConjMinLenSL(U,V)\text{ConjMinLenSL(U,V)}, following the previously studied cases where U=V=GU=V=G. Our results cover several classes of groups: for free groups, we prove that ConjGeo(U,V)\text{ConjGeo(U,V)} and ConjMinLenSL(U,V)\text{ConjMinLenSL(U,V)} are regular if UU and VV are rational subsets; for hyperbolic groups, we show that if LL is a regular language of geodesics and UU is the subsets represented by it, then ConjGeo(U)\text{ConjGeo(U)} and ConjMinLenSL(U)\text{ConjMinLenSL(U)} are regular; for virtually cyclic groups, we show that ConjSL(U)\text{ConjSL(U)} is regular if UU is rational; and, for virtually abelian groups, we prove that ConjGeo(U)\text{ConjGeo(U)} belongs to a certain class of languages \C\C when the language of words representing elements of UU also belongs to \C\C. We also define relative conjugacy growth and show that its behavior can be heavily dependent on the choice of subset.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.20923,
  title  = {Conjugacy languages and conjugacy growth relative to subsets of groups},
  author = {André Carvalho and Ana-Catarina C. Monteiro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.20923},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

22 pages, comments are welcome