Uniform Upper Bounds for Conjugacy Separability Growth in Nilpotent Groups
Abstract
A group is conjugacy separable if every pair of non-conjugate elements remains non-conjugate in some finite quotient. Virtually polycyclic groups, and hence in particular all finitely generated nilpotent groups, are conjugacy separable. The conjugacy separability growth function measures the complexity of distinguishing non-conjugate elements in finite quotients by giving the smallest order of a finite quotient Q that separates them. Recent work showed that this function admits polynomial upper and lower bounds for nilpotent groups, but these estimates are neither explicit nor optimal. We prove improved polynomial upper bounds whose degree is at most linear in the nilpotency class and at most quadratic in the Hirsch length. For $2$-step nilpotent groups, we obtain sharper estimates and show that these estimates are optimal among bounds depending only on the nilpotency class and Hirsch length. This gives a correction of an error in the existing literature. The main tool is a translation of conjugacy separability growth into Lie rings, generalizing previous work in the case of residual finiteness.
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BibTeX
@misc{dere2026uniform,
title = {{Uniform Upper Bounds for Conjugacy Separability Growth in Nilpotent Groups}},
author = {Jonas Deré and Lukas Vandeputte},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.03074},
eprint = {2610.03074},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03074},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Uniform Upper Bounds for Conjugacy Separability Growth in Nilpotent Groups
AU - Jonas Deré
AU - Lukas Vandeputte
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.03074
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03074
AB - A group is conjugacy separable if every pair of non-conjugate elements remains non-conjugate in some finite quotient. Virtually polycyclic groups, and hence in particular all finitely generated nilpotent groups, are conjugacy separable. The conjugacy separability growth function measures the complexity of distinguishing non-conjugate elements in finite quotients by giving the smallest order of a finite quotient Q that separates them. Recent work showed that this function admits polynomial upper and lower bounds for nilpotent groups, but these estimates are neither explicit nor optimal. We prove improved polynomial upper bounds whose degree is at most linear in the nilpotency class and at most quadratic in the Hirsch length. For $2$-step nilpotent groups, we obtain sharper estimates and show that these estimates are optimal among bounds depending only on the nilpotency class and Hirsch length. This gives a correction of an error in the existing literature. The main tool is a translation of conjugacy separability growth into Lie rings, generalizing previous work in the case of residual finiteness.
ER -