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Moe Tabei

Publications and source records attributed to Moe Tabei.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Higman in balls: the mod-2 dichotomy for integral units of the Promislow group

Higman's conjecture that Z[G] has only trivial units, for G torsion-free, is open for the Promislow (Hantzsche-Wendt) group P, the group over which Gardam disproved the field-coefficient unit conjecture in 2021. We introduce an exact reduction of the integral conjecture for P modulo 2 into two sub-problems, record the base cases as consequences of the Craven-Pappas small-length theorems, and argue that the frontier of the integral problem is word-radius 4: a triviality theorem for Z[P] there would be the first statement separating Z from every field. Throughout, claims are ball-limited and stated as such; we make no claim on the full conjecture.

math.GR

The one-sided unit count of F_2[P] at radius four, and an integral separation theorem

Let P be the Hantzsche-Wendt (Promislow) group and B(4) the radius-four ball in its standard word metric. Dietrich, Lee, Nies and Vinyals determined the two-sided count: exactly 36 nontrivial units u of F_2[P] with both supp(u) and supp(u^{-1}) in B(4). We determine the one-sided count: exactly 52 nontrivial units with supp(u) in B(4) and no constraint on the inverse. The 16 new units have inverses supported at radius exactly 5; they form two orbits of size 8 under the symmetry group fixing the generating set, and all 52 units have support size 21 on both sides. Completeness is a single propositional unsatisfiability, certified by a DRAT proof checked with drat-trim. As an arithmetic consequence we prove: no unit of Z[P] with support in B(4) has nontrivial reduction modulo 2 -- with no bound on the coefficients or on the support of the inverse. Since F_2[P] has 52 nontrivial units on that ball, this separates, in the untwisted setting, the integral group ring from its characteristic-two quotient at the first radius where the unit conjecture fails over a field.

math.GR

The quantitative non-unique-product landscape at the global minimum: the Nielsen-Soelberg groups

Nielsen and Soelberg proved that a finite subset $A$ of a torsion-free group with $A\cdot A$ having no unique product satisfies $|A|\ge 8$, and exhibited two groups, here $G_1$ and $G_2$, attaining the bound. Nothing quantitative was known about these extremal configurations. We construct exact, independently verified models of both groups and compute the first quantitative invariants at the global minimum. In $G_1$ no $8$-element symmetric witness lies in the radius-$6$ ball ($933$ elements, certified infeasible), while the Nielsen-Soelberg witness lies in the radius-$7$ ball: the global minimum is spread out. In $G_2$, with its natural eight-generator metric, the witness and its inverse are the only two non-UP $8$-sets in the radius-$1$ ball, and the unique-product staircase takes the value $0$ at $n=8$ but $1$ at $n=9$ -- the first known minimizer whose square has exactly one uniquely represented element, so the simultaneous failure of t.u.p. and u.p. seen in the Promislow group is not universal. No $(7,9)$ two-sided witness exists in the searched balls, so the Nielsen-Soelberg profile bound may not be sharp. Finally we treat the universal group $G_3$. Its structure is known -- Soelberg's thesis identifies an index-$8$ Heisenberg subgroup of step $8$ and proves torsion-freeness, and Gardam, studying the same group as an amalgam of Klein bottle groups, shows it to be virtually nilpotent but not virtually abelian -- and what we add is a model in search coordinates in which balls can be enumerated. In it we reproduce the Nielsen-Soelberg two-sided pair and exhibit a symmetric $15$-element witness whose trivial-coset singleton generates the centre of that Heisenberg subgroup. It is rigid and rare: within $B(5)$ the size $15$ is exactly minimal, the coset profile is forced, and exactly four such witnesses exist in $B(4)$, one orbit. Hence $m_1(G_3)\in[8,15]$ against $m_2(G_3)=16$.

math.GR

Least sizes of non-unique-product sets: the Promislow group and a Heisenberg-type candidate

Let P be the Promislow group, the orientable Hantzsche-Wendt Bieberbach group of dimension 3, which underlies Promislow's classical non-unique-product set and Gardam's disproof of the unit conjecture. A finite set A is non-UP if A.A contains no uniquely represented element; such sets are the combinatorial obstruction in Kaplansky's zero-divisor and unit problems. We make a fully verified computational and structural study of non-UP sets inside P. In an exact integer model we (i) exhibit an explicit non-UP set of 14 elements of minimal word-radius 3 with its complete coincidence pattern; (ii) prove by an exact constraint solver, run to a proof of infeasibility, that the minimum size of a non-UP subset of the radius-r ball is exactly 14 for 3 <= r <= 6; and (iii) isolate the structural reasons why these ball-limited bounds cannot be promoted to all of P by ordering arguments alone. Exploiting that P embeds in D_infinity^3, we prove an effective finite-diameter principle: if a non-UP n-set exists at all, one exists in the ball of explicit radius D(n) <= 4^n poly(n), so P's minimum is effectively decidable. We conjecture D(n) = O(n^{1/3}), under which our radius-6 computation would already prove that 14 is the minimum non-UP cardinality in P; whether 14 is this minimum remains open. We also compute the two-sided minimum, the least |A|+|B| with A.B non-UP: within radius 3 it equals 24, so it lies in [16,24], the lower bound being the Nielsen-Soelberg theorem. As a companion case we treat the Fibonacci group H_4 = F(3,4): it fails the UPP symmetrically with least symmetric size exactly 16 over the radius-4 ball, while its two-sided minimum over the radius-3 ball is 22. The constraint-solver methodology is not new; our contribution is the P-internal data and structure.

math.GR