Regular neighbourhoods and canonical decompositions for groups

Abstract

We find canonical decompositions for finitely presented groups which essentially specialise to the classical JSJ-decomposition when restricted to the fundamental groups of Haken manifolds. The decompositions that we obtain are invariant under automorphisms of the group. A crucial new ingredient is the concept of a regular neighbourhood of a family of almost invariant subsets of a group. An almost invariant set is an analogue of an immersion.