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Twisted Alexander ideals and the isomorphism problem for a family of parafree groups

Part of: Low-dimensional topology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2020

Do Viet Hung  and
Vu The Khoi
Do Viet Hung
Affiliation:
Ha Giang College of Education, Ha Giang, Vietnam (viethunghg81@gmail.com)
Vu The Khoi
Affiliation:
Institute of Mathematics, VietNam Academy of Science and Technology, 18 Hoang Quoc Viet, Hanoi10307, Vietnam (vtkhoi@math.ac.vn)
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Abstract

In 1969, Baumslag introduced a family of parafree groups Gi,j which share many properties with the free group of rank 2. The isomorphism problem for the family Gi,j is known to be difficult; a few small partial results have been found so far. In this paper, we compute the twisted Alexander ideals of the groups Gi,j associated with non-abelian representations into $SL(2,{\mathbb Z}_2)$. Using the twisted Alexander ideals, we prove that several pairs of groups among Gi,j are not isomorphic. As a consequence, we solve the isomorphism problem for sub-families containing infinitely many groups Gi,j.

Keywords

group isomorphism problemtwisted Alexander idealparafree groups

MSC classification

Secondary: 57M05: Fundamental group, presentations, free differential calculus
Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , August 2020 , pp. 780 - 806
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Copyright
Copyright © The Authors, 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on Behalf of The Edinburgh Mathematical Society

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