On conjugacy separability of some Coxeter groups and parabolic-preserving automorphisms

We give formulas for the second and third integral homology of an arbitrary finitely generated Coxeter group, solely in terms of the corresponding Coxeter diagram. The first of these calculations refines a theorem of Howlett, while the second is entirely new and is the first explicit formula for the third homology of an arbitrary Coxeter group.

A new class of positive definite functions related to colour-length function on arbitrary Coxeter group is introduced. Extensions of positive definite functions, called the Riesz-Coxeter product, from the Riesz product on the Rademacher (Abelian Coxeter) group to arbitrary Coxeter group is obtained. Applications to harmonic analysis, operator spaces and noncommutative probability is presented. Characterization of radial and colour-radial functions on dihedral groups and infinite permutation group are shown.

We reinterpret an inequality, due originally to Sidorenko, for linear extensions of posets in terms of convex subsets of the symmetric group $\mathfrak{S}_n$. We conjecture that the analogous inequalities hold in arbitrary (not-necessarily-finite) Coxeter groups $W$, and prove this for the hyperoctahedral groups $B_n$ and all right-angled Coxeter groups. Our proof for $B_n$ (and new proof for $\mathfrak{S}_n$) use a combinatorial insertion map closely related to the well-studied promotion operator on linear extensions; this map may be of independent interest. We also note that the inequalities in question can be interpreted as a triangle inequalities, so that convex hulls can be used to define a new invariant metric on $W$ whenever our conjecture holds. Geometric properties of this metric are an interesting direction for future research.

We investigate the so-called dual Matsumoto property or Hurwitz action in finite, affine and arbitrary Coxeter groups. In particular, we want to investigate how to reduce reflection factorizations and how two reflection factorizations of the same element are related to each other. We are motivated by the dual approach to Coxeter groups proposed by Bessis (2003) and the question whether there is an analogue of the well-known Matsumoto property for reflection factorizations. Our aim is a substantial understanding of the Hurwitz action. We therefore reprove uniformly results of Lewis–Reiner as well as Baumeister–Gobet–Roberts and the first author on the Hurwitz action in finite and affine Coxeter groups. Further we show that in an arbitrary Coxeter group all reduced reflection factorizations of the same element appear in the same Hurwitz orbit after a suitable extension by simple reflections. As parabolic quasi-Coxeter elements play an outstanding role in the study of the Hurwitz action, we aim to characterize these elements. We provide a characterization of maximal parabolic quasi-Coxeter elements in arbitrary Coxeter groups as well as a characterization of all parabolic quasi-Coxeter elements in affine Coxeter groups.

First-order aspects of Coxeter groups

Geodesic growth in right-angled and even Coxeter groups

Involution words are variations of reduced words for twisted involutions in Coxeter groups. They arise naturally in the study of the Bruhat order, of certain Iwahori-Hecke algebra modules, and of orbit closures in flag varieties. Specifically, to any twisted involutions $x$, $y$ in a Coxeter group $W$ with automorphism $*$, we associate a set of involution words $\hat{\mathcal{R}}_*(x,y)$. This set is the disjoint union of the reduced words of a set of group elements $\mathcal{A}_*(x,y)$, which we call the atoms of $y$ relative to $x$. The atoms, in turn, are contained in a larger set $\mathcal{B}_*(x,y) \subset W$ with a similar definition, whose elements we refer to as Hecke atoms. Our main results concern some interesting properties of the sets $\hat{\mathcal{R}}_*(x,y)$ and $\mathcal{A}_*(x,y) \subset \mathcal{B}_*(x,y)$. For finite Coxeter groups we prove that $\mathcal{A}_*(1,y)$ consists of exactly the minimal-length elements $w \in W$ such that $w^* y \leq w$ in Bruhat order, and conjecture a more general property for arbitrary Coxeter groups. In type $A$, we describe a simple set of conditions characterizing the sets $\mathcal{A}_*(x,y)$ for all involutions $x,y \in S_n$, giving a common generalization of three recent theorems of Can, Joyce, and Wyser. We show that the atoms of a fixed involution in the symmetric group (relative to $x=1$) naturally form a graded poset, while the Hecke atoms surprisingly form an equivalence class under the "Chinese relation" studied by Cassaigne, Espie, et al. These facts allow us to recover a recent theorem of Hu and Zhang describing a set of "braid relations" spanning the involution words of any self-inverse permutation. We prove a generalization of this result giving an analogue of Matsumoto's theorem for involution words in arbitrary Coxeter groups.

We compute Aut(W) for any even Coxeter group whose Coxeter diagram is connected, contains no edges labeled 2, and cannot be separated into more than 2 connected components by removing a single vertex. The description is given explicitly in terms of the given presentation for the Coxeter group and admits an easy characterization of those groups W for which Out(W) is finite.

A Coxeter system (W, S ) is called affine-free if its Coxeter diagram contains no affine subdiagram of rank ≥ 3. Let (W, S ) be a Coxeter system of finite rank (i.e. |S | is finite). The main result is that W is affine-free if and only if W has finitely many conjugacy classes of reflection triangles. This implies that the action of W on its Coxeter cubing (defined by Niblo and Reeves [G. Niblo and L. Reeves. Coxeter groups act on CAT(0) cube complexes. J. Group Theory 6 (2003), 399–413]) is cocompact if and only if (W, S ) is affine-free. This result was conjectured in loc. cit. As a corollary, we obtain that affine-free Coxeter groups are biautomatic.

Let W be an arbitrary Coxeter group, possibly of infinite rank. We describe a decomposition of the centralizer ZW (WI ) of an arbitrary parabolic subgroup WI into the center of WI , a Coxeter group and a subgroup defined by a 2-cell complex. Only information about finite parabolic subgroups is required in an explicit computation. By using our description of ZW (WI ), we will be able to reveal a further strong property of the action of the third factor on the second factor, in particular on the finite irreducible components of the second factor.

Let W be an arbitrary Coxeter group. If two elements have expressions that are cyclic shifts of each other (as words), then they are conjugate (as group elements) in W. We say that w is cyclically fully commutative (CFC) if every cyclic shift of any reduced expression for w is fully commutative (i.e., avoids long braid relations). These generalize Coxeter elements in that their reduced expressions can be described combinatorially by acyclic directed graphs, and cyclically shifting corresponds to source-to-sink conversions. In this paper, we explore the combinatorics of the CFC elements and enumerate them in all Coxeter groups. Additionally, we characterize precisely which CFC elements have the property that powers of them remain fully commutative, via the presence of a simple combinatorial feature called a band. This allows us to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a CFC element w to be logarithmic, that is, ?(w k )=k??(w) for all k?1, for a large class of Coxeter groups that includes all affine Weyl groups and simply laced Coxeter groups. Finally, we give a simple non-CFC element that fails to be logarithmic under these conditions.

Wythoff's construction for Coxeter groups

Let $(W,S)$ be a Coxeter system, and write $S=\{s_i:i\in I\}$ , where I is a finite index set. Fix a nonempty convex subset $\mathscr {L}$ of W. If W is of type A, then $\mathscr {L}$ is the set of linear extensions of a poset, and there are important Bender–Knuth involutions $\mathrm {BK}_i\colon \mathscr {L}\to \mathscr {L}$ indexed by elements of I. For arbitrary W and for each $i\in I$ , we introduce an operator $\tau _i\colon W\to W$ (depending on $\mathscr {L}$ ) that we call a noninvertible Bender–Knuth toggle; this operator restricts to an involution on $\mathscr {L}$ that coincides with $\mathrm {BK}_i$ in type A. Given a Coxeter element $c=s_{i_n}\cdots s_{i_1}$ , we consider the operator $\mathrm {Pro}_c=\tau _{i_n}\cdots \tau _{i_1}$ . We say W is futuristic if for every nonempty finite convex set $\mathscr {L}$ , every Coxeter element c and every $u\in W$ , there exists an integer $K\geq 0$ such that $\mathrm {Pro}_c^K(u)\in \mathscr {L}$ . We prove that finite Coxeter groups, right-angled Coxeter groups, rank-3 Coxeter groups, affine Coxeter groups of types $\widetilde A$ and $\widetilde C$ , and Coxeter groups whose Coxeter graphs are complete are all futuristic. When W is finite, we actually prove that if $s_{i_N}\cdots s_{i_1}$ is a reduced expression for the long element of W, then $\tau _{i_N}\cdots \tau _{i_1}(W)=\mathscr {L}$ ; this allows us to determine the smallest integer $\mathrm {M}(c)$ such that $\mathrm {Pro}_c^{{\mathrm {M}}(c)}(W)=\mathscr {L}$ for all $\mathscr {L}$ . We also exhibit infinitely many non-futuristic Coxeter groups, including all irreducible affine Coxeter groups that are not of type $\widetilde A$ , $\widetilde C$ , or $\widetilde G_2$ .

There are two chiral Archimedean polyhedra, the snub cube and snub dodecahedron together with their dual Catalan solids, pentagonal icositetrahedron and pentagonal hexacontahedron. In this paper we construct the chiral polyhedra and their dual solids in a systematic way. We use the proper rotational subgroups of the Coxeter groups and to derive the orbits representing the solids of interest. They lead to the polyhedra tetrahedron, icosahedron, snub cube, and snub dodecahedron respectively. We prove that the tetrahedron and icosahedron can be transformed to their mirror images by the proper rotational octahedral group so they are not classified in the class of chiral polyhedra. It is noted that vertices of the snub cube and snub dodecahedron can be derived from the vectors, which are linear combinations of the simple roots, by the actions of the proper rotation groupsand respectively. Their duals are constructed as the unions of three orbits of the groups of concern. We also construct the polyhedra, quasiregular in general, by combining chiral polyhedra with their mirror images. As a by-product we obtain the pyritohedral group as the subgroup the Coxeter group and discuss the constructions of pyritohedrons. We employ a method which describes the Coxeter groups and their orbits in terms of quaternions.

Special matchings in Coxeter groups