Automorphisms of right-angled Artin groups
by
Ruth Charney
Brandeis University
Coauthors: John Crisp and Karen Vogtmann

Right-angled Artin groups are finitely generated groups whose only relators are commutators between generators. These groups may be thought of as interpolating between free groups (no

generators commute) and free abelian groups (all generators commute). I will report on

progress on a project to study the (outer) automorphism group of a right-angled Artin group

from a geometric perspective. In particular, for 2-dimensional right-angled Artin groups we

construct an "outer space" analogous to Culler and Vogtmann's outer space for free groups

and we use it to bound the virtual cohomological dimension of the outer automorphism group.

Date received: December 5, 2006