The aim of this short survey is to give a quick introduction to the Salvetti complex as a tool for the study of the cohomology of Artin groups. In particular we show how a spectral sequence induced by a filtration on the complex provides a very natural and useful method to study recursively the cohomology of Artin groups, simplifying many computations. In the last section some examples of applications are presented.
It is not known whether or not the stable rational cohomology groups H*(Aut(F∞);Q) always vanish (see Hatcher in [5] and Hatcher and Vogtmann in [7] where they pose the question and show that it does vanish in the first 6 dimensions). We show that either the rational cohomology does not vanish in certain dimensions, or the integral cohomology of a moduli space of pointed graphs does not stabilize in certain other dimensions. Similar results are stated for groups of outer automorphisms. This yields...
Let (W,S) be a Coxeter system such that no two generators in S commute. Assume that the Cayley graph of (W,S) does not contain adjacent hexagons. Then for any two vertices x and y in the Cayley graph of W and any number k ≤ d = dist(x,y) there are at most two vertices z such that dist(x,z) = k and dist(z,y) = d - k. Allowing adjacent hexagons, but assuming that no three hexagons can be adjacent to each other, we show that the number of such intermediate vertices at a given distance from x and y...