Group Actions on Real Cubings and Limit Groups over Partially Commutative Groups

Abstract

We introduce a class of spaces, called real cubings, and study the stucture of groups acting nicely on these spaces. Just as cubings are a natural generalisation of simplicial trees, real cubings can be regarded as a natural generalisation of real trees. Our main result states that a finitely generated group $G$ acts nicely (essentially freely and co-specially) on a real cubing if and only if it is a subgroup of a graph tower (a higher dimensional generalisation of $\omega$-residually free towers and NTQ-groups). It follows that $G$ acts freely, essentially freely and co-specially on a real cubing if and only if $G$ is a subgroup of the graph product of cyclic and (non-exceptional) surface groups. In the particular case when the real cubing is a tree, it follows that $G$ acts freely, essentially freely and co-specially on the real cubing if and only if it is a subgroup of the free product of abelian and surface groups. Hence, our main result can be regarded as a generalisation of the Rips' theorem on free actions on real trees. We apply our results to obtain a characterisation of limit groups over partially commutative groups as subgroups of graph towers. This result generalises the work of Kharlampovich-Miasnikov, \cite{KhMNull}, Sela, \cite{Sela1} and Champetier-Guirardel, \cite{CG} on limit groups over free groups.