Full-featured peak reduction in right-angled Artin groups

Matthew B. Day

Published 2012-11-01, updated 2013-11-19Version 5

We prove a new version of the classical peak-reduction theorem for automorphisms of free groups in the setting of right-angled Artin groups. We use this peak-reduction theorem to prove two important corollaries about the action of the automorphism group of a right-angled Artin group $A_\Gamma$ on the set of $k$-tuples of conjugacy classes from $A_\Gamma$: orbit membership is decidable, and stabilizers are finitely presentable. Further, we explain procedures for checking orbit membership and building presentations of stabilizers. This improves on a previous result of the author's. We overcome a technical difficulty from the previous work by considering infinite generating sets for the automorphism groups. The method also involves a variation on the Hermite normal form for matrices.