Some Orbits of Free Words that are Determined by Measures on Finite Groups

Abstract

Every word in a free group $F$ induces a probability measure on every finite group in a natural manner. It is an open problem whether two words that induce the same measure on every finite group, necessarily belong to the same orbit of $\mathrm{Aut}F$. A special case of this problem, when one of the words is the primitive word $x$, was settled positively by the third author and Parzanchevski [arXiv:1202.3269]. Here we extend this result to the case where one of the words is $x^d$ or ${\left[x,y\right]}^d$ for an arbitrary $d\in \mathbb{Z}$.

16 pages, minor changes, journal version