On Ulam widths of finitely presented infinite simple groups

Abstract

A fundamental notion in group theory, which originates in an article of Ulam and von Neumann from $1947$ is uniform simplicity. A group $G$ is said to be $n$-uniformly simple for $n \in \mathbf{N}$ if for every $f,g\in G\setminus \{id\}$, there is a product of no more than $n$ conjugates of $g$ and $g^{-1}$ that equals $f$. Then $G$ is uniformly simple if it is $n$-uniformly simple for some $n \in \mathbf{N}$, and we refer to the smallest such $n$ as the Ulam width, denoted as $\mathcal{R}(G)$. If $G$ is simple but not uniformly simple, one declares $\mathcal{R}(G)=\infty$. In this article, we construct for each $n\in \mathbf{N}$, a finitely presented infinite simple group $G$ such that $n<\mathcal{R}(G)<\infty$. These are the first such examples among the class of finitely presented infinite simple groups. For the class of finitely generated (but not finitely presentable) infinite simple groups, the existence of such examples was settled in the work of Muranov. However, this had remained open for the class of finitely presented infinite simple groups. Our examples are also of type $F_{\infty}$, which means that they are fundamental groups of aspherical CW complexes with finitely many cells in each dimension. Uniformly simple groups are in particular uniformly perfect: there is an $n\in \mathbf{N}$ such that every element of the group can be expressed as a product of at most $n$ commutators of elements in the group. We also show that the analogous notion of width for uniform perfection is unbounded for our family of finitely presented infinite simple groups. To our knowledge, this is also the first such family.