Mekler's Construction and Murphy's Law for 2-Nilpotent Groups

Mekler’s construction is a powerful technique for building purely algebraic structures from combinatorial ones. Its power lies in the fact that it allows various model-theoretic tameness properties of the combinatorial structure to transfer to the algebraic one. In this paper, we push this ideology much further, describing a broad class of properties that transfer through Mekler’s construction. This technique subsumes many well-known results and opens avenues for many more. As a straightforward application of our methods, we (1) obtain transfer principles for stably embedded pairs of Mekler groups and (2) construct strictly ${\mathsf{N}\mathsf{F}\mathsf{O}\mathsf{P}}_k$ pure groups for all $k\in {\mathbb{N}}_{>2}$. We also answer a question of Chernikov and Hempel on transfer of burden.