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Abstract Motivated by the results of Scott and Patel about “untangling” closed geodesics in finite covers of hyperbolic surfaces, we introduce and study primitivity, simplicity and non-filling index functions for finitely generated free groups. We obtain lower bounds for these functions and relate these free group results back to the setting of hyperbolic surfaces. An appendix by Khalid Bou–Rabee connects the primitivity index function f prim ( n , F N ) to the residual finiteness growth function for F N . 

We show that if a finitely generated group $G$ has a nonelementary WPD action on a hyperbolic metric space $X$ , then the number of $G$ -conjugacy classes of $X$ -loxodromic elements of $G$ coming from a ball of radius $R$ in the Cayley graph of $G$ grows exponentially in $R$ . As an application we prove that for $N\geq 3$ the number of distinct $\text{Out}(F_{N})$ -conjugacy classes of fully irreducible elements $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ from an $R$ -ball in the Cayley graph of $\text{Out}(F_{N})$ with $\log \unicode[STIX]{x1D706}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719})$ of the order of $R$ grows exponentially in $R$ . 

Abstract In this article, we propose an Outer space analog for the principal stratum of the unit tangent bundle to the Teichmüller space ${\mathcal{T}}(S)$ of a closed hyperbolic surface $S$. More specifically, we focus on properties of the geodesics in Teichmüller space determined by the principal stratum. We show that the analogous Outer space “principal” periodic geodesics share certain stability properties with the principal stratum geodesics of Teichmüller space. We also show that the stratification of periodic geodesics in Outer space exhibits some new pathological phenomena not present in the Teichmüller space context.