Connected Reversible Mealy Automata of Prime Size Cannot Generate Infinite Burnside Groups

The simplest example of an infinite Burnside group arises in the class of automaton groups. However there is no known example of such a group generated by a reversible Mealy automaton. It has been proved that, for a connected automaton of size at most 3, or when the automaton is not bireversible, the generated group cannot be Burnside infinite. In this paper, we extend these results to automata with bigger stateset, proving that, if a connected reversible automaton has a prime number of states, it cannot generate an infinite Burnside group

The finiteness of a group generated by a 2-letter invertible-reversible Mealy automaton is decidable

We prove that a semigroup generated by a reversible two-state Mealy automaton is either finite or free of rank 2. This fact leads to the decidability of finiteness for groups generated by two-state or two-letter invertible-reversible Mealy automata and to the decidability of freeness for semigroups generated by two-state invertible-reversible Mealy automata

To Infinity and Beyond

We prove that if a group generated by a bireversible Mealy automaton contains an element of infinite order, then it must have exponential growth. As a direct consequence, no infinite virtually nilpotent group can be generated by a bireversible Mealy automaton