Free products in R. Thompson's group V

Collin Bleak, Olga Salazar-Diaz

Published 2009-11-05Version 1

We investigate free product structures in R. Thompson's group V, primarily by studying the topological dynamics associated with V's action on the Cantor Set. We show that the class of free products which can be embedded into V includes the free product of any two finite groups, the free product of any finite group with Q/Z, and the countable non-abelian free groups. We also show the somewhat surprising result that Z^2*Z does not embed in V, even though V has many embedded copies of Z^2 and has many embedded copies of free products of pairs of its subgroups.