We show that in general for a given group the structure of a maximal hyperbolic tower over a free group is not canonical: we construct examples of groups having hyperbolic tower structures over free subgroups which have arbitrarily large ratios between their ranks. These groups have the same first order theory as non-abelian free groups and we use them to study the weight of types in this theory.

We study lattices in a product $G=G_{1}\times \cdots \times G_{n}$ of non-discrete, compactly generated, totally disconnected locally compact (tdlc) groups. We assume that each factor is quasi just-non-compact, meaning that $G_{i}$ is non-compact and every closed normal subgroup of $G_{i}$ is discrete or cocompact (e.g.  $G_{i}$ is topologically simple). We show that the set of discrete subgroups of $G$ containing a fixed cocompact lattice $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ with dense projections is finite. The same result holds if $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ is non-uniform, provided $G$ has Kazhdan’s property (T). We show that for any compact subset $K\subset G$ , the collection of discrete subgroups $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}\leqslant G$ with $G=\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}K$ and dense projections is uniformly discrete and hence of covolume bounded away from  $0$ . When the ambient group $G$ is compactly presented, we show in addition that the collection of those lattices falls into finitely many $\operatorname{Aut}(G)$ -orbits. As an application, we establish finiteness results for discrete groups acting on products of locally finite graphs with semiprimitive local action on each factor. We also present several intermediate results of independent interest. Notably it is shown that if a non-discrete, compactly generated quasi just-non-compact tdlc group $G$ is a Chabauty limit of discrete subgroups, then some compact open subgroup of $G$ is an infinitely generated pro- $p$ group for some prime $p$ . It is also shown that in any Kazhdan group with discrete amenable radical, the lattices form an open subset of the Chabauty space of closed subgroups.

A tubular group G is a finite graph of groups with ℤ2 vertex groups and ℤ edge groups. We characterize residually finite tubular groups: G is residually finite if and only if its edge groups are separable. Methods are provided to determine if G is residually finite. When G has a single vertex group an algorithm is given to determine residual finiteness.

Quasi-Sturmian words, which are infinite words with factor complexity eventually $n+c$ share many properties with Sturmian words. In this article, we study the quasi-Sturmian colorings on regular trees. There are two different types, bounded and unbounded, of quasi-Sturmian colorings. We obtain an induction algorithm similar to Sturmian colorings. We distinguish them by the recurrence function.

On établit une décomposition de l’homologie stable des groupes d’automorphismes des groupes libres à coefficients polynomiaux contravariants en termes d’homologie des foncteurs. Elle permet plusieurs calculs explicites, qui recoupent des résultats établis de manière indépendante par O. Randal-Williams et généralisent certains d’entre eux. Nos méthodes reposent sur l’examen d’extensions de Kan dérivées associées à plusieurs catégories de groupes libres, la généralisation d’un critère d’annulation homologique à coefficients polynomiaux dû à Scorichenko, le théorème de Galatius identifiant l’homologie stable des groupes d’automorphismes des groupes libres à celle des groupes symétriques, la machinerie des $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ -espaces et le scindement de Snaith.

The residual closure of a subgroup H of a group G is the intersection of all virtually normal subgroups of G containing H. We show that if G is generated by finitely many cosets of H and if H is commensurated, then the residual closure of H in G is virtually normal. This implies that separable commensurated subgroups of finitely generated groups are virtually normal. A stream of applications to separable subgroups, polycyclic groups, residually finite groups, groups acting on trees, lattices in products of trees and just-infinite groups then flows from this main result.

This note contains a (short) proof of the following generalisation of the Friedman–Mineyev theorem (earlier known as the Hanna Neumann conjecture): if $A$ and $B$ are nontrivial free subgroups of a virtually free group containing a free subgroup of index $n$ , then $\text{rank}(A\cap B)-1\leq n\cdot (\text{rank}(A)-1)\cdot (\text{rank}(B)-1)$ . In addition, we obtain a virtually-free-product analogue of this result.

Let $g$ be an element of a finite group $G$ and let $R_{n}(g)$ be the subgroup generated by all the right Engel values $[g,_{n}x]$ over $x\in G$ . In the case when $G$ is soluble we prove that if, for some $n$ , the Fitting height of $R_{n}(g)$ is equal to $k$ , then $g$ belongs to the $(k+1)$ th Fitting subgroup $F_{k+1}(G)$ . For nonsoluble $G$ , it is proved that if, for some $n$ , the generalized Fitting height of $R_{n}(g)$ is equal to $k$ , then $g$ belongs to the generalized Fitting subgroup $F_{f(k,m)}^{\ast }(G)$ with $f(k,m)$ depending only on $k$ and $m$ , where $|g|$ is the product of $m$ primes counting multiplicities. It is also proved that if, for some $n$ , the nonsoluble length of $R_{n}(g)$ is equal to $k$ , then $g$ belongs to a normal subgroup whose nonsoluble length is bounded in terms of $k$ and $m$ . Earlier, similar generalizations of Baer’s theorem (which states that an Engel element of a finite group belongs to the Fitting subgroup) were obtained by the first two authors in terms of left Engel-type subgroups.

Let $\mathfrak{F}$ be a class of finite groups and $G$ a finite group. Let ${\mathcal{L}}_{\mathfrak{F}}(G)$ be the set of all subgroups $A$ of $G$ with $A^{G}/A_{G}\in \mathfrak{F}$ . A chief factor $H/K$ of $G$ is $\mathfrak{F}$ -central in $G$ if $(H/K)\rtimes (G/C_{G}(H/K))\in \mathfrak{F}$ . We study the structure of $G$ under the hypothesis that every chief factor of $G$ between $A_{G}$ and $A^{G}$ is $\mathfrak{F}$ -central in $G$ for every subgroup $A\in {\mathcal{L}}_{\mathfrak{F}}(G)$ . As an application, we prove that a finite soluble group $G$ is a PST-group if and only if $A^{G}/A_{G}\leq Z_{\infty }(G/A_{G})$ for every subgroup $A\in {\mathcal{L}}_{\mathfrak{N}}(G)$ , where $\mathfrak{N}$ is the class of all nilpotent groups.

This note provides an affirmative answer to Problem 2.6 of Praeger and Schneider [‘Group factorisations, uniform automorphisms, and permutation groups of simple diagonal type’, Israel J. Math. 228(2) (2018), 1001–1023]. We will build groups $G$ (abelian, nonabelian and simple) for which there are two automorphisms $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC},\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$ of $G$ such that the map

$$\begin{eqnarray}T=T_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}}\times T_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}:G\longrightarrow G\times G,\quad g\mapsto (g^{-1}g^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}},g^{-1}g^{\,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}})\end{eqnarray}$$

We classify all possible JSJ decompositions of doubles of free groups of rank two, and we also compute the Makanin–Razborov diagram of a particular double of a free group and deduce that in general limit groups are not freely subgroup separable.

Let $G$ be a simple exceptional algebraic group of adjoint type over an algebraically closed field of characteristic $p>0$ and let $X=\text{PSL}_{2}(p)$ be a subgroup of $G$ containing a regular unipotent element $x$ of $G$ . By a theorem of Testerman, $x$ is contained in a connected subgroup of $G$ of type $A_{1}$ . In this paper we prove that with two exceptions, $X$ itself is contained in such a subgroup (the exceptions arise when $(G,p)=(E_{6},13)$ or $(E_{7},19)$ ). This extends earlier work of Seitz and Testerman, who established the containment under some additional conditions on $p$ and the embedding of $X$ in $G$ . We discuss applications of our main result to the study of the subgroup structure of finite groups of Lie type.

We prove that every finitely-generated right-angled Artin group embeds into some Brin–Thompson group nV. It follows that any virtually special group can be embedded into some nV, a class that includes surface groups, all finitely-generated Coxeter groups, and many one-ended hyperbolic groups.

For every element $x$ of a finite group $G$ , there always exists a unique minimal subnormal subgroup, say, $G_{x}$ of $G$ such that $x\in G_{x}$ . The sub-class of $G$ in which $x$ lies is defined by $\{x^{g}\mid g\in G_{x}\}$ . The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of the sub-class sizes on the structure of finite groups.

A group G has restricted centralizers if for each g in G the centralizer $C_G(g)$ either is finite or has finite index in G. A theorem of Shalev states that a profinite group with restricted centralizers is abelian-by-finite. In the present paper we handle profinite groups with restricted centralizers of word-values. We show that if w is a multilinear commutator word and G a profinite group with restricted centralizers of w-values, then the verbal subgroup w(G) is abelian-by-finite.

Let p be an odd prime and let G be a non-abelian finite p-group of exponent p2 with three distinct characteristic subgroups, namely 1, Gp and G. The quotient group G/Gp gives rise to an anti-commutative 𝔽p-algebra L such that the action of Aut (L) is irreducible on L; we call such an algebra IAC. This paper establishes a duality G ↔ L between such groups and such IAC algebras. We prove that IAC algebras are semisimple and we classify the simple IAC algebras of dimension at most 4 over certain fields. We also give other examples of simple IAC algebras, including a family related to the m-th symmetric power of the natural module of SL(2, 𝔽).

A generalisation of von Staudt’s theorem that every permutation of the projective line that preserves harmonic quadruples is a projective semilinear map is given. It is then concluded that any proper supergroup of permutations of the projective semilinear group over an algebraically closed field of transcendence degree at least 1 is 4-transitive.

We generalize the result about the congruence subgroup property for GGS groups in [3] to the family of multi-GGS groups; that is, all multi-GGS groups except the one defined by the constant vector have the congruence subgroup property. New arguments are provided to produce this more general proof.

We show that for any n and q, the number of real conjugacy classes in $ \rm{PGL}(\it{n},\mathbb{F}_q) $ is equal to the number of real conjugacy classes of $ \rm{GL}(\it{n},\mathbb{F}_q) $ which are contained in $ \rm{SL}(\it{n},\mathbb{F}_q) $ , refining a result of Lehrer [J. Algebra36(2) (1975), 278–286] and extending the result of Gill and Singh [J. Group Theory14(3) (2011), 461–489] that this holds when n is odd or q is even. Further, we show that this quantity is equal to the number of real conjugacy classes in $ \rm{PGU}(\it{n},\mathbb{F}_q) $ , and equal to the number of real conjugacy classes of $ \rm{U}(\it{n},\mathbb{F}_q) $ which are contained in $ \rm{SU}(\it{n},\mathbb{F}_q) $ , refining results of Gow [Linear Algebra Appl.41 (1981), 175–181] and Macdonald [Bull. Austral. Math. Soc.23(1) (1981), 23–48]. We also give a generating function for this common quantity.

We use a coarse version of the fundamental group first introduced by Barcelo, Kramer, Laubenbacher and Weaver to show that box spaces of finitely presented groups detect the normal subgroups used to construct the box space, up to isomorphism. As a consequence, we have that two finitely presented groups admit coarsely equivalent box spaces if and only if they are commensurable via normal subgroups. We also provide an example of two filtrations (Ni) and (Mi) of a free group F such that Mi > Ni for all i with [Mi:Ni] uniformly bounded, but with $\squ _{(N_i)}F$ not coarsely equivalent to $\squ _{(M_i)}F$ . Finally, we give some applications of the main theorem for rank gradient and the first ℓ2 Betti number, and show that the main theorem can be used to construct infinitely many coarse equivalence classes of box spaces with various properties.