Abelianization of some groups of interval exchanges

TL;DR

This paper studies the abelianization of groups of interval exchange transformations, revealing their structure and torsion properties, and extends results to groups with flips, showing their abelianization involves 2-elementary groups.

Contribution

It characterizes the abelianization of various subgroups of interval exchange transformations, including those with flips, using skew-symmetric powers and torsion analysis.

Findings

The abelianization of IET subgroups is isomorphic to second skew-symmetric powers of preimages of subgroups in R.

The abelianization often contains non-trivial 2-torsion not detected by SAF-homomorphism.

The abelianization of IET with flips involves 2-elementary abelian groups related to tensor and wedge products.

Abstract

Let IET be the group of bijections from $\mathopen{[}0,1 \mathclose{[}$ to itself that are continuous outside a finite set, right-continuous and piecewise translations. The abelianization homomorphism $f: \text{IET} \to A$, called SAF-homomorphism, was described by Arnoux-Fathi and Sah. The abelian group $A$ is the second exterior power of the reals over the rationals. For every subgroup $\Gamma$ of $\mathbb{R/Z}$ we define $\text{IET}(\Gamma)$ as the subgroup of $\text{IET}$ consisting of all elements $f$ such that $f$ is continuous outside $\Gamma$. Let $\tilde{\Gamma}$ be the preimage of $\Gamma$ in $\mathbb{R}$. We establish an isomorphism between the abelianization of $\text{IET}(\Gamma)$ and the second skew-symmetric power of $\tilde{\Gamma}$ over $\mathbb{Z}$ denoted by ${}^\circleddash\!\!\bigwedge^2_{\mathbb{Z}} \tilde{\Gamma}$. This group often has non-trivial $2$-torsion, which is not detected by the SAF-homomorphism. We then define $\text{IET}^{\bowtie}$ the group of all interval exchange transformations with flips. Arnoux proved that this group is simple thus perfect. However for every subgroup $\text{IET}^{\bowtie}(\Gamma)$ we establish an isomorphism between its abelianization and $\langle \lbrace a \otimes a ~ [\text{mod}~2] \mid a \in \tilde{\Gamma} \rbrace \rangle \times \langle \lbrace \ell \wedge \ell ~ [\text{mod}~2] \mid \ell \in \tilde{\Gamma} \rbrace \rangle$ which is a $2$-elementary abelian subgroup of $\bigotimes^2_{\mathbb{Z}} \tilde{\Gamma} / (2\bigotimes^2_{\mathbb{Z}} \tilde{\Gamma}) \times {}^\circleddash\!\!\bigwedge^2_{\mathbb{Z}} \tilde{\Gamma} / (2 {}^\circleddash\!\!\bigwedge^2_{\mathbb{Z}} \tilde{\Gamma})$.