Random subgroups of Thompson's group $F$

Abstract

We consider random subgroups of Thompson's group $F$ with respect to two natural stratifications of the set of all $k$ generator subgroups. We find that the isomorphism classes of subgroups which occur with positive density are not the same for the two stratifications. We give the first known examples of {\em persistent} subgroups, whose isomorphism classes occur with positive density within the set of $k$-generator subgroups, for all sufficiently large $k$. Additionally, Thompson's group provides the first example of a group without a generic isomorphism class of subgroup. Elements of $F$ are represented uniquely by reduced pairs of finite rooted binary trees. We compute the asymptotic growth rate and a generating function for the number of reduced pairs of trees, which we show is D-finite and not algebraic. We then use the asymptotic growth to prove our density results.

37 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Geometric quasi-isometric embeddings into Thompson's group F

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Random subgroups and analysis of the length-based and quotient attacks
• Spectral measures associated to rank two Lie groups and finite subgroups of $GL(2,\mathbb{Z})$
• Counting difficult tree pairs with respect to the rotation distance problem
• Random Generation of Thompson's group $F$