Bounding reflection length in an affine Coxeter group

Jon McCammond, T. Kyle Petersen

Published 2010-09-24, updated 2010-10-22Version 2

In any Coxeter group, the conjugates of elements in the standard minimal generating set are called reflections and the minimal number of reflections needed to factor a particular element is called its reflection length. In this article we prove that the reflection length function on an affine Coxeter group has a uniform upper bound. More precisely we prove that the reflection length function on an affine Coxeter group that naturally acts faithfully and cocompactly on $\R^n$ is bounded above by $2n$ and we also show that this bound is optimal. Conjecturally, spherical and affine Coxeter groups are the only Coxeter groups with a uniform bound on reflection length.