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We discuss Bass's conjecture on the vanishing of the Hattori-Stallings rank from the viewpoint of geometric group theory. It is noted that groups without u-elements satisfy this conjecture. This leads in particular to a simple proof of the conjecture in the case of groups of subexponential growth.

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...