Millican Colloquium, Ignat Soroko (Florida State University) | Department of Mathematics

Millican Colloquium, Ignat Soroko (Florida State University)

Event Information
Event Location: 
GAB 461
Event Date: 
Friday, October 22, 2021 - 4:30pm

Title: Divergence in Coxeter groups

Abstract: Divergence of a metric space is an interesting quasi-isometry invariant of the space which measures how geodesic rays diverge outside of a ball of radius r, as a function of r. Divergence of a finitely generated group is defined as the divergence of its Cayley graph. For symmetric spaces of non-compact type the divergence is either linear or exponential, and Gromov suggested that the same dichotomy should hold in a much larger class of non-positively curved CAT(0) spaces. However this turned out not to be the case and we now know that the spectrum of possible divergence functions on groups is very rich. In a joint project with Pallavi Dani, Yusra Naqvi, and Anne Thomas, we initiate the study of the divergence in the general Coxeter groups. We introduce a combinatorial invariant called the `hypergraph index', which is computable from the Coxeter graph of the group, and use it to characterize when a Coxeter group has linear, quadratic or exponential divergence, and also when its divergence is bounded by a polynomial.