Ideals of equations for elements in a free group and Stallings folding

TL;DR

This paper develops algorithms based on Stallings folding to compute and analyze ideals of equations for elements in free groups, including minimal degree equations and their structural properties.

Contribution

It introduces algorithms for computing generators of the ideal of equations, finding minimal degree equations, and characterizing the degrees of equations in the ideal.

Findings

Algorithms for generating the ideal of equations using Stallings folding.

Existence of minimal degree equations and their properties.

Characterization of the set of degrees of equations in the ideal.

Abstract

Let $F$ be a finitely generated free group and let $H\le F$ be a finitely generated subgroup. Given an element $g\in F$, we study the ideal $\mathfrak{I}_g$ of equations for $g$ with coefficients in $H$, i.e. the elements $w(x)\in H*\langle x\rangle$ such that $w(g)=1$ in $F$. The ideal $\mathfrak{I}_g$ is a normal subgroup of $H*\langle x\rangle$, and we provide an algorithm, based on Stallings folding operations, to compute a finite set of generators for $\mathfrak{I}_g$ as a normal subgroup. We provide an algorithm to find an equation in $\mathfrak{I}_g$ with minimum degree, i.e. an equation $w(x)$ such that its cyclic reduction contains the minimum possible number of occurrences of $x$ and $x^{-1}$; this answers a question of A. Rosenmann and E. Ventura. More generally, we provide an algorithm that, given $d\in\mathbb{N}$, determines whether $\mathfrak{I}_g$ contains equations of degree $d$ or not, and we give a characterization of the set of all the equations of that specific degree. We define the set $D_g$ of all integers $d$ such that $\mathfrak{I}_g$ contains equations of degree $d$; we show that $D_g$ coincides, up to a finite set, either with the set of non-negative even numbers or with the set of natural numbers. Finally, we provide examples to illustrate the techniques introduces in this paper. We discuss the case where $\text{rank}(H)=1$. We prove that both kinds of sets $D_g$ can actually occur. The examples also show that the equations of minimum possible degree aren't in general enough to generate the whole ideal $\mathfrak{I}_g$ as a normal subgroup.