On the Finiteness of the Classifying Space for Virtually Cyclic Subgroups

This thesis mainly deals with finiteness properties of the classifying space for the family of virtually cyclic subgroups. We establish a link between the finiteness of the classifying space and the conjugacy growth invariant of the given group and use this connection to show that the classifying space for virtually cyclic subgroups is not of finite type except in trivial cases if the group is linear or a CAT(0) cube group. We also investigate the class of residually finite groups in this context and along the way come close to a classification of the finite groups which have only two conjugacy classes of maximal cyclic subgroups