Verbal subgroups of hyperbolic groups have infinite width

Alexei Myasnikov, Andrey Nikolaev

Published 2011-07-19, updated 2014-08-27Version 5

Let $G$ be a non-elementary hyperbolic group. Let $w$ be a group word such that the set $w[G]$ of all its values in $G$ does not coincide with $G$ or 1. We show that the width of verbal subgroup $w(G)=<w[G]>$ is infinite. That is, there is no such $l\in\mathbb Z$ that any $g\in w(G)$ can be represented as a product of $\le l$ values of $w$ and their inverses.