Forest-skein groups III: simplicity

Abstract

An Ore forest-skein category provides three forest-skein groups equipped with a powerful diagrammatic calculus analogous to Richard Thompson's groups F,T,V. We investigate when forest-skein groups have simple derived subgroups and establish two characterisations: a dynamical one and a categorical one. We then construct two classes of examples. The first associates two finitely presented simple groups to every finite binary tree and the second associates two simple groups to every n-ary Higman-Thompson group.