A Wilson Group of Non-Uniformly Exponential Growth

Abstract

This note constructs a finitely generated group $W$ whose word-growth is exponential, but for which the infimum of the growth rates over all finite generating sets is 1 -- in other words, of non-uniformly exponential growth. This answers a question by Mikhael Gromov. The construction also yields a group of intermediate growth $V$ that locally resembles $W$ in that (by changing the generating set of $W$) there are isomorphic balls of arbitrarily large radius in $V$ and $W$'s Cayley graphs.