Connectivity Properties for Actions on Locally Finite Trees

Abstract

Given an action by a finitely generated group G on a locally finite tree T, we view points of the visual boundary \partialT as directions in T and use ρ to lift this sense of direction to G. For each point E \in \partialT, this allows us to ask if G is (n - 1)-connected "in the direction of E". The invariant Σ^n(ρ) \subseteq \partialT then records the set of directions in which G is (n-1)-connected. In this paper, we introduce a family of actions for which Σ^1(ρ) can be calculated through analysis of certain quotient maps between trees. We show that for actions of this sort, under reasonable hypotheses, Σ1(ρ) consists of no more than a single point. By strengthening the hypotheses, we are able to characterize precisely when a given end point lies in Σ^n(ρ) for any n.

13 pages, 1 figure. To be published in Pacific Journal of Mathematics