Conjugacy in Garside groups I: Cyclings, powers, and rigidity

In this paper a relation between iterated cyclings and iterated powers of elements in a Garside group is shown. This yields a characterization of elements in a Garside group having a rigid power, where ‘rigid’ means that the left normal form changes only in the obvious way under cycling and decyclin...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Birman, Joan S., Gebhardt, Volker, González-Meneses López, Juan
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2007
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/42271
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/11441/42271
https://doi.org/10.4171/GGD/12
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Garside groups
conjugacy problem
ultra summit set
rigidity
stable ultra summit set
Descripción
Sumario:In this paper a relation between iterated cyclings and iterated powers of elements in a Garside group is shown. This yields a characterization of elements in a Garside group having a rigid power, where ‘rigid’ means that the left normal form changes only in the obvious way under cycling and decycling. It is also shown that, given X in a Garside group, if some power X m is conjugate to a rigid element, then m can be bounded above by ||∆||3. In the particular case of braid groups {Bn, n ∈ N}, this implies that a pseudo-Anosov braid has a small power whose ultra summit set consists of rigid elements. This solves one of the problems in the way of a polynomial solution to the conjugacy decision problem (CDP) and the conjugacy search problem (CSP) in braid groups. In addition to proving the rigidity theorem, it will be shown how this paper fits into the authors’ program for finding a polynomial algorithm to the CDP/CSP, and what remains to be done.