Regular prism tilings in {{\widetilde{\bf SL_{2}R}}} space

\({{\widetilde{\bf SL_{2}R}}}\) geometry is one of the eight 3-dimensional Thurston geometries, it can be derived from the 3-dimensional Lie group of all 2 × 2 real matrices with determinant one. Our aim is to describe and visualize the regular infinite or bounded p-gonal prism tilings in \({{\widetilde{\bf SL_{2}R}}}\) . For this purpose we introduce the notion of infinite and bounded prisms, prove that there exist infinitely many regular infinite p-gonal face-to-face prism tilings \({\mathcal{T}^i_p(q)}\) and infinitely many regular bounded p-gonal non-face-to-face \({{\widetilde{\bf SL_{2}R}}}\) prism tilings \({\mathcal{T}_p(q)}\) for integer parameters \({p,q; 3 \leq p, \frac{2p}{p-2} < q}\) . Moreover, we describe the symmetry group of \({\mathcal{T}_p(q)}\) via its index 2 rotational subgroup, denoted by pq2 ₁ . Surprisingly this group already occurred in our former work (Molnár et al., J Geometry, 95:91–133, 2009) in another context. We also develop a method to determine the data of the space filling regular infinite and bounded prism tilings. We apply the above procedure to \({\mathcal{T}^i_3(q)}\) and \({\mathcal{T}_3(q)}\) where 6 < q and visualize them and the corresponding tilings. E. Molnár showed, that homogeneous 3-spaces have a unified interpretation in the projective 3-sphere \({\mathcal{PS}^3}\) and 3-space \({\mathcal{P}^3({\bf V}^4,{\bf V}_4, {\bf R})}\) . In our work we will use this projective model of \({{\widetilde{\bf SL_{2}R}}}\) and in this manner the prisms and prism tilings can be visualized on the Euclidean screen of a computer.