The Deligne complex for the four-strand braid group

Charney, Ruth

doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-03-03425-1

The Deligne complex for the four-strand braid group
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Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 356 (2004), 3881-3897 Request permission

Abstract:

This paper concerns the homotopy type of hyperplane arrangements associated to infinite Coxeter groups acting as reflection groups on $\mathbb C^n$. A long-standing conjecture states that the complement of such an arrangement should be aspherical. Some partial results on this conjecture were previously obtained by the author and M. Davis. In this paper, we extend those results to another class of Coxeter groups. The key technical result is that the spherical Deligne complex for the 4-strand braid group is CAT(1).

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