Words with intervening neighbours in infinite Coxeter groups are reduced

Abstract

Consider a graph with vertex set S. A word in the alphabet S has the intervening neighbours property if any two occurrences of the same letter are separated by all its graph neighbours. For a Coxeter graph, words represent group elements. Speyer recently proved that words with the intervening neighbours property are irreducible if the group is infinite and irreducible. We present a new and shorter proof using the root automaton for recognition of irreducible words.