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* The authors thank the “Swiss National Science Foundation” for its support. We study the subgroup structure, Hecke algebras, quasi-regular representations, and asymptotic properties of some fractal groups of branch type. We introduce parabolic subgroups, show that they are weakly maximal, and that the corresponding quasi-regular representations are irreducible. These (infinite-dimensional) representations are approximated by finite-dimensional quasi-regular representations. The...

We give a general definition of branched, self-similar Lie algebras, and show that important examples of Lie algebras fall into that class. We give sufficient conditions for a self-similar Lie algebra to be nil, and prove in this manner that the self-similar algebras associated with Grigorchuk’s and Gupta–Sidki’s torsion groups are nil as well as self-similar.We derive the same results for a class of examples constructed by Petrogradsky, Shestakov and Zelmanov.

We show that there exists a finitely generated group of growth $\sim f$ for all functions $f:{ℝ}_{+}\to {ℝ}_{+}$ satisfying $f\left(2R\right)\le f{\left(R\right)}^2\le f\left({\eta }_{+}R\right)$ for all $R$ large enough and ${\eta }_{+}\approx 2.4675$ the positive root of $X^3-X^2-2X-4$. Set ${\alpha }_{-}=log2/log{\eta }_{+}\approx 0.7674$; then all functions that grow uniformly faster than $exp\left(R^{{\alpha }_{-}}\right)$ are realizable as the growth of a group. We also give a family of sum-contracting branched groups of growth $\sim exp\left(R^{\alpha }\right)$ for a dense set of $\alpha \in [{\alpha }_{-},1]$.

Let $T_1,\cdots ,T_d$ be homogeneous trees with degrees $q_1+1,\cdots ,q_d+1\ge 3$, respectively. For each tree, let $𝔥:T_j\to \mathbb{Z}$ be the Busemann function with respect to a fixed boundary point (end). Its level sets are the horocycles. The horocyclic product of $T_1,\cdots ,T_d$ is the graph $\mathrm{𝖣𝖫}(q_1,\cdots ,q_d)$ consisting of all $d$-tuples $x_1\cdots x_d\in T_1\times \cdots \times T_d$ with $𝔥\left(x_1\right)+\cdots +𝔥\left(x_d\right)=0$, equipped with a natural neighbourhood relation. In the present paper, we explore the geometric, algebraic, analytic and probabilistic properties of these graphs and their isometry groups. If $d=2$ and $q_1=q_2=q$ then we obtain a Cayley graph of the...

Numerical estimates are given for the spectral radius of simple random walks on Cayley graphs. Emphasis is on the case of the fundamental group of a closed surface, for the usual system of generators.