Growth of structure constants of free Lie algebras relative to Hall bases

Abstract

We derive a priori bounds on the size of the structure constants of the free Lie algebra over a set of indeterminates, relative to its Hall bases. We investigate their asymptotic growth, especially as a function of the length of the involved Lie brackets. First, using the classical recursive decomposition algorithm, we obtain a rough upper bound valid for all Hall bases. We then introduce new notions (which we call alphabetic subsets and relative foldings) related to structural properties of the Lie brackets created by the algorithm, which allow us to prove a sharp upper bound for the general case. We also prove that the length of the relative folding provides a strictly decreasing indexation of the recursive rewriting algorithm. Moreover, we derive lower bounds on the structure constants proving that they grow at least geometrically in all Hall bases. Second, for the celebrated historical length-compatible Hall bases and the Lyndon basis, we prove tighter sharp upper bounds, which turn out to be geometric in the length of the brackets. Third, we construct two new Hall bases, illustrating two opposite behaviors in the two-indeterminates case. One is designed so that its structure constants have the minimal growth possible, matching exactly the general lower bound, linked with the Fibonacci sequence. The other one is designed so that its structure constants grow super-geometrically. Eventually, we investigate asymmetric growth bounds which isolate the role of one particular indeterminate. Despite the existence of super-geometric Hall bases, we prove that the asymmetric growth with respect to each fixed indeterminate is uniformly at most geometric in all Hall bases.