English

Cubulating mapping tori of some polynomial growth free group automorphisms

Group Theory 2025-08-14 v3

Abstract

Let FF be a finite-rank free group and let ΦOut(F)\Phi\in\mathrm{Out}(F) have polynomial growth. Let G=FΦZG=F\rtimes_\Phi\mathbb{Z}. We give sufficient conditions on Φ\Phi that ensure GG acts freely on a CAT(0) cube complex. For d=1d=1, the class of GG that we cubulate strictly contains tubular free-by-cyclic groups, which were cubulated by Button. For d>1d>1, we cubulate GG provided, for instance, the linear-growth mapping tori contained in GG are tubular and GG satisfies a condition on intersections of certain centralisers. These conditions are satisfied when the growth rate of Φ\Phi is as large as possible for FF. Using this, we show that for any fixed FF, a random unipotent polynomially growing automorphism Φ\Phi has cubulated mapping torus. We do not work directly with relative train tracks, but rely on them via the cyclic hierarchy from work of Macura in the superlinear case and the splitting over Z2\mathbb{Z}^2 subgroups from from work of Andrew-Martino and Dahmani-Touikan in the linear case. Our proof relies on cubical small-cancellation theory to obtain free actions on CAT(0) cube complexes for groups admitting suitable acylindrical cyclic hierarchies whose bottom-level vertex groups are cubulated; this technical result is of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.07879,
  title  = {Cubulating mapping tori of some polynomial growth free group automorphisms},
  author = {Mark Hagen and Daniel T Wise},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.07879},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Previous version contained a gap. The current version fills it in some cases, so the theorems stated in the introduction have changed compared to the previous version. This does not seem to affect anything elsewhere in the literature