Bucolic Complexes

We introduce and investigate bucolic complexes, a common generalization of systolic complexes and of CAT(0) cubical complexes. They are defined as simply connected prism complexes satisfying some local combinatorial conditions. We study various approaches to bucolic complexes: from graph-theoretic and topological perspective, as well as from the point of view of geometric group theory. In particular, we characterize bucolic complexes by some properties of their 2-skeleta and 1-skeleta (that we call bucolic graphs), by which several known results are generalized. We also show that locally-finite bucolic complexes are contractible, and satisfy some nonpositive-curvature-like properties.Comment: 45 pages, 4 figure

Panel collapse and its applications

We describe a procedure called panel collapse for replacing a CAT(0) cube complex $\Psi$ by a "lower complexity" CAT(0) cube complex $\Psi_\bullet$ whenever $\Psi$ contains a codimension-$2$ hyperplane that is extremal in one of the codimension-$1$ hyperplanes containing it. Although $\Psi_\bullet$ is not in general a subcomplex of $\Psi$, it is a subspace consisting of a subcomplex together with some cubes that sit inside $\Psi$ "diagonally". The hyperplanes of $\Psi_\bullet$ extend to hyperplanes of $\Psi$. Applying this procedure, we prove: if a group $G$ acts cocompactly on a CAT(0) cube complex $\Psi$, then there is a CAT(0) cube complex $\Omega$ so that $G$ acts cocompactly on $\Omega$ and for each hyperplane $H$ of $\Omega$, the stabiliser in $G$ of $H$ acts on $H$ essentially. Using panel collapse, we obtain a new proof of Stallings's theorem on groups with more than one end. As another illustrative example, we show that panel collapse applies to the exotic cubulations of free groups constructed by Wise. Next, we show that the CAT(0) cube complexes constructed by Cashen-Macura can be collapsed to trees while preserving all of the necessary group actions. (It also illustrates that our result applies to actions of some non-discrete groups.) We also discuss possible applications to quasi-isometric rigidity for certain classes of graphs of free groups with cyclic edge groups. Panel collapse is also used in forthcoming work of the first-named author and Wilton to study fixed-point sets of finite subgroups of $\mathrm{Out}(F_n)$ on the free splitting complex. Finally, we apply panel collapse to a conjecture of Kropholler, obtaining a short proof under a natural extra hypothesis.Comment: Revised according to referee comments. This version accepted in "Groups, Geometry, and Dynamics

Subquadratic-time algorithm for the diameter and all eccentricities on median graphs

On sparse graphs, Roditty and Williams [2013] proved that no $O(n^{2-\varepsilon})$-time algorithm achieves an approximation factor smaller than $\frac{3}{2}$ for the diameter problem unless SETH fails. In this article, we solve an open question formulated in the literature: can we use the structural properties of median graphs to break this global quadratic barrier? We propose the first combinatiorial algorithm computing exactly all eccentricities of a median graph in truly subquadratic time. Median graphs constitute the family of graphs which is the most studied in metric graph theory because their structure represents many other discrete and geometric concepts, such as CAT(0) cube complexes. Our result generalizes a recent one, stating that there is a linear-time algorithm for all eccentricities in median graphs with bounded dimension $d$, i.e. the dimension of the largest induced hypercube. This prerequisite on $d$ is not necessarily anymore to determine all eccentricities in subquadratic time. The execution time of our algorithm is $O(n^{1.6408}\log^{O(1)} n)$. We provide also some satellite outcomes related to this general result. In particular, restricted to simplex graphs, this algorithm enumerates all eccentricities with a quasilinear running time. Moreover, an algorithm is proposed to compute exactly all reach centralities in time $O(2^{3d}n\log^{O(1)}n)$.Comment: 43 pages, extended abstract in STACS 202

Groups acting on quasi-median graphs. An introduction

Quasi-median graphs have been introduced by Mulder in 1980 as a generalisation of median graphs, known in geometric group theory to naturally coincide with the class of CAT(0) cube complexes. In his PhD thesis, the author showed that quasi-median graphs may be useful to study groups as well. In the present paper, we propose a gentle introduction to the theory of groups acting on quasi-median graphs.Comment: 16 pages. Comments are welcom

On embeddings of CAT(0) cube complexes into products of trees

We prove that the contact graph of a 2-dimensional CAT(0) cube complex ${\bf X}$ of maximum degree $\Delta$ can be coloured with at most $\epsilon(\Delta)=M\Delta^{26}$ colours, for a fixed constant $M$. This implies that ${\bf X}$ (and the associated median graph) isometrically embeds in the Cartesian product of at most $\epsilon(\Delta)$ trees, and that the event structure whose domain is ${\bf X}$ admits a nice labeling with $\epsilon(\Delta)$ labels. On the other hand, we present an example of a 5-dimensional CAT(0) cube complex with uniformly bounded degrees of 0-cubes which cannot be embedded into a Cartesian product of a finite number of trees. This answers in the negative a question raised independently by F. Haglund, G. Niblo, M. Sageev, and the first author of this paper.Comment: Some small corrections; main change is a correction of the computation of the bounds in Theorem 1. Some figures repaire