L-presentations and branch groups

Abstract

We introduce L-presentations: group presentations given by a generating set, a set of relations and a set of substitution rules on the generating set producing more relations. We first study in full generality the structure of finitely L-presented groups, i.e. groups for which all the above sets are finite, and then show that a broad class of groups acting on rooted trees admit explicitly constructible finite L-presentations: they are the "branch" groups defined by R. Grigorchuk.