English

Virtually free groups are almost homogeneous

Group Theory 2018-10-29 v1 Logic

Abstract

Free groups are known to be homogeneous, meaning that finite tuples of elements which satisfy the same first-order properties are in the same orbit under the action of the automorphism group. We show that virtually free groups have a slightly weaker property, which we call uniform almost-homogeneity: the set of kk-tuples which satisfy the same first-order properties as a given kk-tuple u\mathbf{u} is the union of a finite number of Aut(G)\mathrm{Aut}(G)-orbits, and this number is bounded independently from u\mathbf{u} and kk. Moreover, we prove that there exists a virtually free group which is not \exists-homogeneous. We also prove that all hyperbolic groups are homogeneous in a probabilistic sense.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.11200,
  title  = {Virtually free groups are almost homogeneous},
  author = {Simon André},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.11200},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

31 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:53:22.722Z