49 research outputs found
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
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
An Improved Homomorphism Preservation Theorem From Lower Bounds in Circuit Complexity
Previous work of the author [Rossmann\u2708] showed that the Homomorphism Preservation Theorem of classical model theory remains valid when its statement is restricted to finite structures. In this paper, we give a new proof of this result via a reduction to lower bounds in circuit complexity, specifically on the AC0 formula size of the colored subgraph isomorphism problem. Formally, we show the following: if a first-order sentence of quantifier-rank k is preserved under homomorphisms on finite structures, then it is equivalent on finite structures to an existential-positive sentence of quantifier-rank poly(k). Quantitatively, this improves the result of [Rossmann\u2708], where the upper bound on quantifier-rank is a non-elementary function of k