On the symmetry of images of word maps in groups

摘要

Word maps on a group are defined by substitution of formal words. Lubotzky gave a characterization of the images of word maps in finite simple groups, and a consequence of his characterization is the existence of a group G such that the image of some word map on G is not closed under inversion. We show that there are only two groups with order less than 108 with the property that there is a word map with image not closed under inversion. We also study this behavior in nilpotent groups.