Jérémie Chalopin, Victor Chepoi, Anthony Genevois,
Hiroshi Hirai and Damian Osajda
Geometry & Topology 29 (2025) 1–70
DOI: 10.2140/gt.2025.29.1
Abstract
Helly graphs are graphs in which every family of pairwise-intersecting balls has a
nonempty intersection. This is a classical and widely studied class of graphs. We
focus on groups acting geometrically on Helly graphs —
Helly groups. We
provide numerous examples of such groups: all (Gromov) hyperbolic groups,
cubical groups, finitely presented graphical
–
small cancellation groups and type-preserving uniform lattices in Euclidean buildings of
type
are Helly; free products of Helly groups with amalgamation over finite subgroups,
graph products of Helly groups, some diagram products of Helly groups, some
right-angled graphs of Helly groups and quotients of Helly groups by finite normal
subgroups are Helly. We show many properties of Helly groups: biautomaticity,
existence of finite-dimensional models for classifying spaces for proper actions,
contractibility of asymptotic cones, existence of EZ-boundaries, satisfiability of
the Farrell–Jones conjecture and satisfiability of the coarse Baum–Connes
conjecture. This leads to new results for some classical families of groups (eg
for FC-type Artin groups) and to a unified approach to results obtained
earlier.
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