Quasi-isometrically embedded subgroups of braid and diffeomorphism groups

Abstract

We show that a large class of right-angled Artin groups (in particular, those with planar complementary defining graph) can be embedded quasi-isometrically in pure braid groups and in the group of area preserving diffeomorphisms of the disk fixing the boundary (with respect to the L2-norm metric); this extends results of Benaim and Gambaudo who gave quasi-isometric embeddings of F and for all n>0. As a consequence we are also able to embed a variety of Gromov hyperbolic groups quasi-isometrically in pure braid groups and in the diffeomorphism group of the disk. Examples include hyperbolic surface groups, some HNN-extensions of these along cyclic subgroups and the fundamental group of a certain closed hyperbolic 3-manifold.