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1. 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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2. 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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3. The crystallographic spin point groups and their representations

   https://doi.org/10.21468/SciPostPhys.18.3.109  

   Schiff, Hana; Corticelli, Alberto; Guerreiro, Afonso; Romhányi, Judit; McClarty, Paul A (March 2025, SciPost Physics)

   The spin point groups are finite groups whose elements act on both real space and spin space. Among these groups are the magnetic point groups in the case where the real and spin space operations are locked to one another. The magnetic point groups are central to magnetic crystallography for strong spin-orbit coupled systems and the spin point groups generalize these to the intermediate and weak spin-orbit coupled cases. The spin point groups were introduced in the 1960’s in the context of condensed matter physics and enumerated shortly thereafter. In this paper, we complete the theory ofcrystallographic spin point groups by presenting an account of these groups and their representation theory. Our main findings are that the so-called nontrivial spin point groups (numbering598 $598$groups) have co-irreps corresponding exactly to the (co-)-irreps of regular or black and white groups and we tabulate this correspondence for each nontrivial group. However a total spin group, comprising the product of a nontrivial group and a spin-only group, has new co-irreps in cases where there is continuous rotational freedom. We provide explicit co-irrep tables for all these instances. We also discuss new forms of spin-only group extending the Litvin-Opechowski classes. To exhibit the usefulness of these groups to physically relevant problems we discuss a number of examples from electronic band structures of altermagnets to magnons. 

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4. Ultrahomogeneous tensor spaces

   Harman, N; Snowden, A (May 2024, Advances in mathematics)

   A cubic space is a vector space equipped with a symmetric trilinear form. Using categorical Fraïssé theory, we show that there is a universal ultrahomogeneous cubic space V of countable infinite dimension, which is unique up to isomorphism. The automorphism group G of V is quite large and, in some respects, similar to the infinite orthogonal group. We show that G is a linear-oligomorphic group (a class of groups we introduce), and we determine the algebraic representation theory of G. We also establish some model-theoretic results about V: it is ω-categorical (in a modified sense), and has quantifier elimination (for vectors). Our results are not specific to cubic spaces, and hold for a very general class of tensor spaces; we view these spaces as linear analogs of the relational structures studied in model theory. 

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5. Stability and Approximations for Decorated Reeb Spaces

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2024.44  

   Curry, Justin; Mio, Washington; Needham, Tom; Okutan, Osman Berat; Russold, Florian (January 2024, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)

   Mulzer, Wolfgang; Phillips, Jeff M (Ed.)

   Given a map f:X → M from a topological space X to a metric space M, a decorated Reeb space consists of the Reeb space, together with an attribution function whose values recover geometric information lost during the construction of the Reeb space. For example, when M = ℝ is the real line, the Reeb space is the well-known Reeb graph, and the attributions may consist of persistence diagrams summarizing the level set topology of f. In this paper, we introduce decorated Reeb spaces in various flavors and prove that our constructions are Gromov-Hausdorff stable. We also provide results on approximating decorated Reeb spaces from finite samples and leverage these to develop a computational framework for applying these constructions to point cloud data. 

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