English

On endomorphisms of torsion-free hyperbolic groups

Group Theory 2010-02-24 v2

Abstract

Let HH be a torsion-free δ\delta-hyperbolic group with respect to a finite generating set SS. Let a1,...,ana_1,..., a_n and a1,...,ana_{1*},..., a_{n*} be elements of HH such that aia_{i*} is conjugate to aia_i for each i=1,...,ni=1,..., n. Then, there is a uniform conjugator if and only if W(a1,...,an)W(a_{1*},..., a_{n*}) is conjugate to W(a1,...,an)W(a_1,..., a_n) for every word WW in nn variables and length up to a computable constant depending only on δ\delta, S\sharp{S} and i=1nai\sum_{i=1}^n |a_i|. As a corollary, we deduce that there exists a computable constant C=C(δ,S)\mathcal{C}=\mathcal{C}(\delta, \sharp S) such that, for any endomorphism ϕ\phi of HH, if ϕ(h)\phi(h) is conjugate to hh for every element hHh\in H of length up to C\mathcal {C}, then ϕ\phi is an inner automorphism. Another corollary is the following: if HH is a torsion-free conjugacy separable hyperbolic group, then Out(H)\text{\rm Out}(H) is residually finite. When particularizing the main result to the case of free groups, we obtain a solution for a mixed version of the classical Whitehead's algorithm.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0903.2306,
  title  = {On endomorphisms of torsion-free hyperbolic groups},
  author = {O. Bogopolski and E. Ventura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.2306},
  year   = {2010}
}