Effective construction of covers of canonical Hom-diagrams for equations over torsion-free hyperbolic groups

Abstract We show that, given a finitely generated group G as the coordinate group of a finite system of equations over a torsion-free hyperbolic group Γ, there is an algorithm which constructs a cover of a canonical solution diagram. The diagram encodes all homomorphisms from G to Γ as compositions of factorizations through Γ-NTQ groups and canonical automorphisms of the corresponding NTQ-subgroups. We also give another characterization of Γ-limit groups as iterated generalized doubles over Γ.