English

Thickness, relative hyperbolicity, and randomness in Coxeter groups

Group Theory 2017-03-22 v1 Combinatorics Geometric Topology

Abstract

For right-angled Coxeter groups WΓW_{\Gamma}, we obtain a condition on Γ\Gamma that is necessary and sufficient to ensure that WΓW_{\Gamma} is thick and thus not relatively hyperbolic. We show that Coxeter groups which are not thick all admit canonical minimal relatively hyperbolic structures; further, we show that in such a structure, the peripheral subgroups are both parabolic (in the Coxeter group-theoretic sense) and strongly algebraically thick. We exhibit a polynomial-time algorithm that decides whether a right-angled Coxeter group is thick or relatively hyperbolic. We analyze random graphs in the Erd\'{o}s-R\'{e}nyi model and establish the asymptotic probability that a random right-angled Coxeter group is thick. In the joint appendix we study Coxeter groups in full generality and there we also obtain a dichotomy whereby any such group is either strongly algebraically thick or admits a minimal relatively hyperbolic structure. In this study, we also introduce a notion we call \emph{intrinsic horosphericity} which provides a dynamical obstruction to relative hyperbolicity which generalizes thickness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1312.4789,
  title  = {Thickness, relative hyperbolicity, and randomness in Coxeter groups},
  author = {Jason Behrstock and Mark F. Hagen and Alessandro Sisto and Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.4789},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Primary article by Behrstock, Hagen, and Sisto with an appendix by Behrstock, Caprace, Hagen, and Sisto. 31 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. All necessary C++ code can be downloaded from this ArXiv page. The same C++ code, along with instructions and control scripts, is available at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mfhagen/thickracgcode.tar

R2 v1 2026-06-22T02:29:29.929Z