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1. Right-angled Artin groups as normal subgroups of mapping class groups

   https://doi.org/10.1112/S0010437X21007417  

   Clay, Matt ; Mangahas, Johanna ; Margalit, Dan ( August 2021 , Compositio Mathematica)

   We construct the first examples of normal subgroups of mapping class groups that are isomorphic to non-free right-angled Artin groups. Our construction also gives normal, non-free right-angled Artin subgroups of other groups, such as braid groups and pure braid groups, as well as many subgroups of the mapping class group, such as the Torelli subgroup. Our work recovers and generalizes the seminal result of Dahmani–Guirardel–Osin, which gives free, purely pseudo-Anosov normal subgroups of mapping class groups. We give two applications of our methods: (1) we produce an explicit proper normal subgroup of the mapping class group that is not contained in any level $m$ congruence subgroup and (2) we produce an explicit example of a pseudo-Anosov mapping class with the property that all of its even powers have free normal closure and its odd powers normally generate the entire mapping class group. The technical theorem at the heart of our work is a new version of the windmill apparatus of Dahmani–Guirardel–Osin, which is tailored to the setting of group actions on the projection complexes of Bestvina–Bromberg–Fujiwara. 

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2. Largest acylindrical actions and Stability in hierarchically hyperbolic groups

   Abbott, Carolyn ; Behrstock, Jason ; Durham, Matthew ( July 2020 , Transactions of the American Mathematical Society)

   We consider two manifestations of non-positive curvature: acylindrical actions (on hyperbolic spaces) and quasigeodesic stability. We study these properties for the class of hierarchically hyperbolic groups, which is a general framework for simultaneously studying many important families of groups, including mapping class groups, right-angled Coxeter groups, most 3–manifold groups, right-angled Artin groups, and many others. A group that admits an acylindrical action on a hyperbolic space may admit many such actions on different hyperbolic spaces. It is natural to try to develop an understanding of all such actions and to search for a “best” one. The set of all cobounded acylindrical actions on hyperbolic spaces admits a natural poset structure, and in this paper we prove that all hierarchically hyperbolic groups admit a unique action which is the largest in this poset. The action we construct is also universal in the sense that every element which acts loxodromically in some acylindrical action on a hyperbolic space does so in this one. Special cases of this result are themselves new and interesting. For instance, this is the first proof that right-angled Coxeter groups admit universal acylindrical actions. The notion of quasigeodesic stability of subgroups provides a natural analogue of quasi- convexity which can be considered outside the context of hyperbolic groups. In this paper, we provide a complete classification of stable subgroups of hierarchically hyperbolic groups, generalizing and extending results that are known in the context of mapping class groups and right-angled Artin groups. Along the way, we provide a characterization of contracting quasigeodesics; interestingly, in this generality the proof is much simpler than in the special cases where it was already known. 

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3. Largest acylindrical actions and Stability in hierarchically hyperbolic groups

   https://doi.org/10.1090/btran/50  

   Abbott, Carolyn ; Behrstock, Jason ; Durham, Matthew ( February 2021 , Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Series B)

   We consider two manifestations of non-positive curvature: acylindrical actions (on hyperbolic spaces) and quasigeodesic stability. We study these properties for the class of hierarchically hyperbolic groups, which is a general framework for simultaneously studying many important families of groups, including mapping class groups, right-angled Coxeter groups, most 3 3 –manifold groups, right-angled Artin groups, and many others. A group that admits an acylindrical action on a hyperbolic space may admit many such actions on different hyperbolic spaces. It is natural to try to develop an understanding of all such actions and to search for a “best” one. The set of all cobounded acylindrical actions on hyperbolic spaces admits a natural poset structure, and in this paper we prove that all hierarchically hyperbolic groups admit a unique action which is the largest in this poset. The action we construct is also universal in the sense that every element which acts loxodromically in some acylindrical action on a hyperbolic space does so in this one. Special cases of this result are themselves new and interesting. For instance, this is the first proof that right-angled Coxeter groups admit universal acylindrical actions. The notion of quasigeodesic stability of subgroups provides a natural analogue of quasiconvexity which can be considered outside the context of hyperbolic groups. In this paper, we provide a complete classification of stable subgroups of hierarchically hyperbolic groups, generalizing and extending results that are known in the context of mapping class groups and right-angled Artin groups. Along the way, we provide a characterization of contracting quasigeodesics; interestingly, in this generality the proof is much simpler than in the special cases where it was already known. In the appendix, it is verified that any space satisfying the a priori weaker property of being an “almost hierarchically hyperbolic space” is actually a hierarchically hyperbolic space. The results of the appendix are used to streamline the proofs in the main text. 

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4. Minimal volume entropy of free-by-cyclic groups and 2-dimensional right-angled Artin groups

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00208-021-02211-9  

   Bregman, Corey ; Clay, Matt ( April 2021 , Mathematische Annalen)

   null (Ed.)

   Let G be a free-by-cyclic group or a 2-dimensional right-angled Artin group. We provide an algebraic and a geometric characterization for when each aspherical simplicial complex with fundamental group isomorphic to G has minimal volume entropy equal to 0. In the nonvanishing case, we provide a positive lower bound to the minimal volume entropy of an aspherical simplicial complex of minimal dimension for these two classes of groups. Our results rely upon a criterion for the vanishing of the minimal volume entropy for 2-dimensional groups with uniform uniform exponential growth. This criterion is shown by analyzing the fiber π1-growth collapse and non-collapsing assumptions of Babenko-Sabourau. 

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5. Non-quasiconvex subgroups of hyperbolic groups via Stallings-like techniques

   https://doi.org/10.1090/tran/8801  

   Dani, Pallavi ; Levcovitz, Ivan ( November 2022 , Transactions of the American Mathematical Society)

   We provide a new method of constructing non-quasiconvex subgroups of hyperbolic groups by utilizing techniques inspired by Stallings’ foldings. The hyperbolic groups constructed are in the natural class of right-angled Coxeter groups (RACGs for short) and can be chosen to be$2$-dimensional. More specifically, given a non-quasiconvex subgroup of a (possibly non-hyperbolic) RACG, our construction gives a corresponding non-quasiconvex subgroup of a hyperbolic RACG. We use this to construct explicit examples of non-quasiconvex subgroups of hyperbolic RACGs including subgroups whose generators are as short as possible (length two words), finitely generated free subgroups, non-finitely presentable subgroups, and subgroups of fundamental groups of square complexes of nonpositive sectional curvature.

    

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