BESTVINA’S-NORMAL-FORM-COMPLEX-AND-THEHOMOLOGY-OF-GARSIDE-GROUPS.pdfVIP

BESTVINA’S NORMAL FORM COMPLEX AND THE HOMOLOGY OF GARSIDE GROUPS RUTH CHARNEY, JOHN MEIER, AND KIM WHITTLESEY Abstract. A Garside group is a group admitting a finite lattice generating set D . Using techniques developed by Bestvina for Artin groups of finite type, we construct K (π, 1)s for Garside groups. This construction shows that the (co)homology of any Garside group G is easily computed given the lattice D , and there is a simple sufficient condition that implies G is a duality group. The universal covers of these K (π, 1)s enjoy Bestvina’s weak non-positive curvature condition. Under a certain tameness condition, this implies that every solvable subgroup of G is virtually abelian. 1. Introduction The main goal of this note is to establish the following result: Main Theorem. Garside groups admit finite K (π, 1)s. A Garside group G is the group of fractions of a Garside monoid G+ , where G+ contains a ‘Garside element’ ∆ whose divisors form a finite lattice D that generates G+ . (We give a complete definition in §2.) These groups, first introduced by Dehornoy and Paris in [17], generalize Artin groups of finite type, and they share many formal properties with Artin groups of finite type. The construction of these K (π, 1)s is concrete and is based on the lattice D . That is, given the lattice D , our proof of the Main Theorem is constructive, and one can easily compute the (co)homology of the associated Garside group (see Theorem 3.6). Topological properties of subcomplexes of the geometric realization |D| give information on the end connectivity of any Garside group, which yields a simple condition implying that a given Garside group