Séance Séminaire

Séminaire Gaston Darboux

Shortcut graphs and groups

Shortcut graphs are graphs in which long enough cycles cannot embed without metric distortion. Shortcut groups are groups which act properly and cocompactly on shortcut graphs. These notions unify a surprisingly broad family of graphs and groups of interest in geometric group theory and metric graph theory including: systolic and quadric groups (in particular finitely presented C(6) and C(4)-T(4) small cancellation groups), cocompactly cubulated groups, hyperbolic groups, Coxeter groups and the Baumslag-Solitar group BS(1,2). Most of these examples satisfy a strong form of the shortcut property. I will discuss some of these examples as well as some general constructions and properties of shortcut graphs and groups.