English

Subgroup and Coset Intersection in abelian-by-cyclic groups

Group Theory 2023-09-28 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

We consider two decision problems in infinite groups. The first problem is Subgroup Intersection: given two finitely generated subgroups G,H\langle \mathcal{G} \rangle, \langle \mathcal{H} \rangle of a group GG, decide whether the intersection GH\langle \mathcal{G} \rangle \cap \langle \mathcal{H} \rangle is trivial. The second problem is Coset Intersection: given two finitely generated subgroups G,H\langle \mathcal{G} \rangle, \langle \mathcal{H} \rangle of a group GG, as well as elements g,hGg, h \in G, decide whether the intersection of the two cosets gGhHg \langle \mathcal{G} \rangle \cap h \langle \mathcal{H} \rangle is empty. We show that both problems are decidable in finitely generated abelian-by-cyclic groups. In particular, we reduce them to the Shifted Monomial Membership problem (whether an ideal of the Laurent polynomial ring over integers contains any element of the form Xzf,  zZ{0}X^z - f,\; z \in \mathbb{Z} \setminus \{0\}). We also point out some obstacles for generalizing these results from abelian-by-cyclic groups to arbitrary metabelian groups.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.08811,
  title  = {Subgroup and Coset Intersection in abelian-by-cyclic groups},
  author = {Ruiwen Dong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.08811},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

25 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:23:14.163Z