Powers of Dehn twists generating right-angled Artin groups

Abstract

We give a bound for the exponents of powers of Dehn twists to generate a right-angled Artin group. Precisely, if $\mathcal{F}$ is a finite collection of pairwise distinct simple closed curves on a finite type surface and if $N$ denotes the maximum of the intersection numbers of all pairs of curves in $\mathcal{F}$, then we prove that $\{T_\gamma^n \,\vert\, \gamma \in \mathcal{F} \}$ generates a right-angled Artin group for all $n \geq N^2 + N + 3$. This extends a previous result of Koberda, who proved the existence of a bound possibly depending on the underlying hyperbolic structure of the surface. In the course of the proof, we obtain a universal bound depending only on the topological type of the surface in certain cases, which partially answers a question due to Koberda.