Title: Residually finite groups as subgroups of branch groups

Abstract: A group is a branch group, if it admits a "nice" action on a rooted tree. The class of branch groups contains a number of famous groups (e.g. the first Grigorchuk group) which are known for their exotic properties. We give a short introduction to branch groups and discuss some famous examples. We will see that branch groups are residually finite, this means, they admit many finite quotients. Then we explain a new method that allows to embed any residually finite group into a branch group.  It turns out that this embedding preserves a number of properties. As an application, we obtain the first examples of non-amenable torsion branch groups.

This talk is based on joint work with Eduard Schesler.