Related papers: Word maps have large image

If w is a word in d>1 letters and G is a finite group, evaluation of w on a uniformly randomly chosen d-tuple in G gives a random variable with values in G, which may or may not be uniform. It is known that if G ranges over finite simple…

We extend Borel's theorem on the dominance of word maps from semisimple algebraic groups to some perfect groups. In another direction, we generalize Borel's theorem to some words with constants. We also consider the surjectivity problem for…

Word maps in a group, an analogue of polynomials in groups, are defined by substitution of formal words. Lubotzky gave a characterization of the images of word maps in finite simple groups, and a consequence of his characterization is the…

In response to questions by Kassabov, Nikolov and Shalev, we show that a given subset $A$ of a finite simple group $G$ is the image of some word map $w : G\times G\to G $ if and only if (i) $A$ contains the identity and (ii) $A$ is…

If $A$ is a finite group (or a finite ring) and $\omega$ is a word map (or a polynomial map), we define the quantity $|\omega(A)|/|A|$ as the image ratio of $\omega$ on $A$ and will be denoted by $\mu(\omega,A)$. In this article, we…

Elements of the free group define interesting maps, known as word maps, on groups. It was previously observed by Lubotzky that every subset of a finite simple group that is closed under endomorphisms occurs as the image of some word map. We…

We consider word maps and word maps with constants on a simple algebraic group. We present results on the images of such maps, in particular, we prove a theorem on the dominance of general word maps with constants, which can be viewed as an…

We establish new characterizations of primitive elements and free factors in free groups, which are based on the distributions they induce on finite groups. For every finite group $G$, a word $w$ in the free group on $k$ generators induces…

The study of verbal subgroups within a group is well-known for being an effective tool to obtain structural information about a group. Therefore, conditions that allow the classification of words in a free group are of paramount importance.…

It is shown that the big free group (the set of countably-long words over a countable alphabet) is almost free, in the sense that any function from the alphabet to a compact topological group factors through a homomorphism. This statement…

We show that an element w of a free group F on n generators defines a surjective word map of PSL(2,C)^n onto PSL(2,C) unless w belongs to the second derived subgroup of F. We also describe certain words maps that are surjective on SL(2,C) x…

A word $w$ in a free group is {\em achiral} if for every group $G,$ $G_w=G_{w^{-1}},$ where $G_w$ is the image of the word map $w$ on $G.$ We will give few classes of examples of achiral words. Cocke and Ho asked whether Engel words are…

In this paper, we study the fibers of "automorphic word maps", a certain generalization of word maps, on finite groups and on nonabelian finite simple groups in particular. As an application, we derive a structural restriction on finite…

We study the impact of certain identities and probabilistic identities on the structure of finite groups. More specifically, let $w$ be a nontrivial word in $d$ distinct variables and let $G$ be a finite group for which the word map…

We construct non-power words which have small image in SL(2; 22n) for each n. In particular, the corresponding word maps are non-surjective. We also use this to construct word maps whose values are precisely the identity and a single…

Let v and w be nontrivial words in two free groups. We prove that, for all sufficiently large finite non-abelian simple groups G, there exist subsets C of v(G) and D of w(G) of size such that every element of G can be realized in at least…

Consider a group word w in n letters. For a compact group G, w induces a map G^n \rightarrow G$ and thus a pushforward measure {\mu}_w on G from the Haar measure on G^n. We associate to each word w a 2-dimensional cell complex X(w) and…

We study word maps with constants on symmetric groups. Even though there are mixed identities of bounded length that are valid for all symmetric groups, we show that no such identities hold in a metric sense. Moreover, we prove that word…

We study fibers of word maps in finite, profinite, and residually finite groups. Our main result is that, for any word w in the free group on d generators, there exists $\epsilon > 0$ such that if G is a residually finite group with…

Let $w=w(x_1,...,x_n)$ be a word, i.e. an element of the free group $F = \langle x_1,...,x_n \rangle$. The verbal subgroup $w(G)$ of a group $G$ is the subgroup generated by the set $\{ w(x_1,...,x_n) : x_1,...,x_n \in G \}$ of all…