Canonical bases for normal subgroups of finitely generated free groups with finite abelian factor groups.
We give a characterization of the geometric automorphisms in a certain class of (not necessarily irreducible) free group automorphisms. When the automorphism is geometric, then it is induced by a pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism without interior singularities. An outer free group automorphism is given by a -cocycle of a -complex (a standard dynamical branched surface, see [7] and [9]) the fundamental group of which is the mapping-torus group of the automorphism. A combinatorial construction elucidates...
Let Out(Fn) denote the outer automorphism group of the free group Fn with n>3. We prove that for any finite index subgroup Γ<Out(Fn), the group Aut(Γ) is isomorphic to the normalizer of Γ in Out(Fn). We prove that Γ is co-Hopfian: every injective homomorphism Γ→Γ is surjective. Finally, we prove that the abstract commensurator Comm(Out(Fn)) is isomorphic to Out(Fn).
If G is a countable group containing a copy of F₂ then the conjugacy equivalence relation on subgroups of G attains the maximal possible complexity.
For a finitely generated group, we study the relations between its rank, the maximal rank of its free quotient, called co-rank (inner rank, cut number), and the maximal rank of its free abelian quotient, called the Betti number. We show that any combination of the group's rank, co-rank, and Betti number within obvious constraints is realized for some finitely presented group (for Betti number equal to rank, the group can be chosen torsion-free). In addition, we show that the Betti number is additive...