Quotient and blow-up of automorphisms of graphs of groups

In this paper, we study the quotient and “blow-up” of graph-of-groups [Formula: see text] and of their automorphisms [Formula: see text]. We show that the existence of such a blow-up of any [Formula: see text], relative to a given family of “local” graph-of-groups isomorphisms [Formula: see text] depends crucially on the [Formula: see text]-conjugacy class of the correction term [Formula: see text] for any edge [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text]-conjugacy is a new but natural concept introduced here. As an application, we obtain a criterion as to whether a partial Dehn twist can be blown up relative to local Dehn twists, to give an actual Dehn twist. The results of this paper are also used crucially in the follow-up papers [Lustig and Ye, Normal form and parabolic dynamics for quadratically growing automorphisms of free groups, arXiv:1705.04110v2; Ye, Partial Dehn twists of free groups relative to local Dehn twists — A dichotomy, arXiv:1605.04479 ; When is a polynomially growing automorphism of [Formula: see text] geometric, arXiv:1605.07390 ].