Related papers: On double cosets in free groups

We show that every closed normal subgroup of infinite index in a profinite surface group $\Gamma$ is contained in a semi-free profinite normal subgroup of $\Gamma$. This answers a question of Bary-Soroker, Stevenson, and Zalesskii.

If G is a semidirect product N by H with N normal and finitely generated then G has the property that every finite group is a quotient of some finite index subgroup of G if and only if one of N and H has this property. This has applications…

We investigate the structure of subdirect products of groups, particularly their finiteness properties. We pay special attention to the subdirect products of free groups, surface groups and HNN extensions. We prove that a finitely presented…

Recently there has been a lot of research and progress in profinite groups. We survey some of the new results and discuss open problems. A central theme is decompositions of finite groups into bounded products of subsets of various kinds…

A Seifert surface F for a knot K is free if the complement of F is a handlebody (i.e., has free fundamental group). The free genus of K is the minimum genus among all free Seifert surfaces for K. In this paper we show that there exist…

We prove that the genus of a finite-dimensional division algebra is finite whenever the center is a finitely generated field of any characteristic. We also discuss potential applications of our method to other problems, including the…

Let $G$ be a linear algebraic group defined over an algebraically closed field. The double coset question addressed in this paper is the following: Given closed subgroups $X$ and $P$, is the double coset collection $X\backslash G/P$ finite…

Let $F$ be a finitely generated free group. We present an algorithm such that, given a subgroup $H\leqslant F$, decides whether $H$ is the fixed subgroup of some family of automorphisms, or family of endomorphisms of $F$ and, in the…

The set of all closed subgroups of a profinite carries a natural profinite topology. This space of subgroups can be classified up to homeomorphism in many cases, and tight bounds placed on its complexity as expressed by its scattered…

Surface groups are known to be the Poincar\'e Duality groups of dimension two since the work of Eckmann, Linnell and M\"uller. We prove a prosolvable analogue of this result that allows us to show that surface groups are profinitely (and…

A profinite group is called small if it has only finitely many open subgroups of index n for each positive integer n. We show that every Frattini cover of a small profinite group is small. A profinite group is called strongly complete if…

A group $G$ is said to satisfy the finitely generated intersection property (f.g.i.p.) if the intersection of any two finitely generated subgroups of $G$ is again finitely generated. The aim of this article is to understand when the…

We introduce the condition of a profinite group being semi-free, which is more general than being free and more restrictive than being quasi-free. In particular, every projective semi-free profinite group is free. We prove that the usual…

We define, for any group $G$, finite approximations ; with this tool, we give a new presentation of the profinite completion $\hat{\pi} : G \to \hat{G}$ of an abtract group $G$. We then prove the following theorem : if $k$ is a finite prime…

Given an arbitrary, finitely presented, residually finite group $\Gamma$, one can construct a finitely generated, residually finite, free-by-free group $M_\Gamma = F_\infty\rtimes F_4$ and an embedding $M_\Gamma \hookrightarrow (F_4\ast…

We show that the virtual second Betti number of a finitely generated, residually free group $G$ is finite if and only if $G$ is either free, free abelian or the fundamental group of a closed surface. We also prove a similar statement in…

Let M = H^3 / \Gamma be a hyperbolic 3-manifold of finite volume. We show that if H and K are abelian subgroups of \Gamma and g is in \Gamma, then the double coset HgK is separable in \Gamma. As a consequence we prove that if M is a closed,…

We prove that amongst the class of free-by-cyclic groups, Gromov hyperbolicity is an invariant of the profinite completion. We show that whenever $G$ is a free-by-cyclic group with first Betti number equal to one, and $H$ is a…

Let w be a group-word. Suppose that the set of all w-values in a profinite group G is contained in a union of countably many cosets of subgroups. We are concerned with the question to what extent the structure of the verbal subgroup w(G)…

The kth finite subset space of a topological space X is the space exp_k X of non-empty finite subsets of X of size at most k, topologised as a quotient of X^k. The construction is a homotopy functor and may be regarded as a union of…