arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin Brück.
We prove the $K$- and $L$-theoretic Farrell-Jones Conjecture with coefficients in an additive category for every normally poly-free group, in particular for even Artin groups of FC-type, and for all groups of the form $A\rtimes \mathbb{Z}$ where $A$ is a right-angled Artin group. Our proof relies on the work of Bestvina-Fujiwara-Wigglesworth on the Farrell--Jones Conjecture for free-by-cyclic groups.
We show that the complex of free factors of a free group of rank n > 1 is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres of dimension n-2. We also prove that for n > 1, the complement of (unreduced) Outer space in the free splitting complex is homotopy equivalent to the complex of free factor systems and moreover is (n-2)-connected. In addition, we show that for every non-trivial free factor system of a free group, the corresponding relative free splitting complex is contractible.
In recent years, cosmic shear has emerged as a powerful tool to study the statistical distribution of matter in our Universe. Apart from the standard two-point correlation functions, several alternative methods like peak count statistics offer competitive results. Here we show that persistent homology, a tool from topological data analysis, can extract more cosmological information than previous methods from the same dataset. For this, we use persistent Betti numbers to efficiently summarise the full topological structure of weak lensing aperture mass maps. This method can be seen as an extension of the peak count statistics, in which we additionally capture information about the environment surrounding the maxima. We first demonstrate the performance in a mock analysis of the KiDS+VIKING-450 data: we extract the Betti functions from a suite of $w$CDM $N$-body simulations and use these to train a Gaussian process emulator that provides rapid model predictions; we next run a Markov-Chain Monte Carlo analysis on independent mock data to infer the cosmological parameters and their uncertainty. When comparing our results, we recover the input cosmology and achieve a constraining power on $S_8 \equiv σ_8\sqrt{Ω_\mathrm{m}/0.3}$ that is 5% tighter than that of peak count statistics. Performing the same analysis on 100 deg$^2$ of Euclid-like simulations, we are able to improve the constraints on $S_8$ and $Ω_\mathrm{m}$ by 18% and 10%, respectively, while breaking some of the degeneracy between $S_8$ and the dark energy equation of state. To our knowledge, the methods presented here are the most powerful topological tools to constrain cosmological parameters with lensing data.
We show that in general for a given group the structure of a maximal hyperbolic tower over a free group is not canonical: We construct examples of groups having hyperbolic tower structures over free subgroups which have arbitrarily large ratios between their ranks. These groups have the same first order theory as non-abelian free groups and we use them to study the weight of types in this theory.
We show how to find higher generating families of subgroups, in the sense of Abels and Holz, for groups acting on Cohen-Macaulay complexes. We apply this to groups with a BN-pair to prove higher generation by parabolic and Levi-subgroups and describe higher generating families of parabolic subgroups in Aut(F_n).