The ray graph is a Gromov hyperbolic graph on which the mapping class group of the plane minus a Cantor set acts by isometries. We give a description of the Gromov boundary of the ray graph in terms of cliques of long rays on the plane minus a Cantor set. As a consequence, we prove that the Gromov boundary of the ray graph is homeomorphic to a quotient of a subset of the circle.
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We introduce the concept of boundary rigidity for Gromov hyperbolic spaces. We show that a proper geodesic Gromov hyperbolic space with a pole is boundary rigid if and only if its Gromov boundary is uniformly perfect. As an application, we show that for a non-compact Gromov hyperbolic complete Riemannian manifold or a Gromov hyperbolic uniform graph, boundary rigidity is equivalent to having positive Cheeger isoperimetric constant and also to being nonamenable. Moreover, several hyperbolic fillings of compact metric spaces are proved to be boundary rigid if and only if the metric spaces are un…
We describe, under some additional technical assumptions, the Gromov boundary of the free product of several $G_i$'s amalgamated wrt. $H$, where $G_i$ are hyperbolic groups with boundary homeomorphic to a densely punctured $n$-sphere, and $H$ is their common subgroup corresponding to a peripheral sphere in each of the $\partial G_i$'s.
The contracting boundary of a proper geodesic metric space generalizes the Gromov boundary of a hyperbolic space. It consists of contracting geodesics up to bounded Hausdorff distances. Another generalization of the Gromov boundary is the $κ$-Morse boundary with a sublinear function $κ$. The two generalizations model the Gromov boundary based on different characteristics of geodesics in Gromov hyperbolic spaces. It was suspected that the $κ$-Morse boundary contains the contracting boundary. We will prove this conjecture: when $κ=1$ is the constant function, the 1-Morse boundary and the contrac…
We define analogues of the graphs of free splittings, of cyclic splittings, and of maximally-cyclic splittings of $F_N$ for free products of groups, and show their hyperbolicity. Given a countable group $G$ which splits as $G=G_1\ast\dots\ast G_k\ast F$, where $F$ denotes a finitely generated free group, we identify the Gromov boundary of the graph of relative cyclic splittings with the space of equivalence classes of $\mathcal{Z}$-averse trees in the boundary of the corresponding outer space. A tree is \emph{$\mathcal{Z}$-averse} if it is not compatible with any tree $T'$, that is itself comp…
In this paper we study the global geometry of the Kobayashi metric on domains in complex Euclidean space. We are particularly interested in developing necessary and sufficient conditions for the Kobayashi metric to be Gromov hyperbolic. For general domains, it has been suggested that a non-trivial complex affine disk in the boundary is an obstruction to Gromov hyperbolicity. This is known to be the case when the set in question is convex. In this paper we first extend this result to $\mathbb{C}$-convex sets with $C^1$-smooth boundary. We will then show that some boundary regularity is necessar…
Let $M$ be a compact smooth Riemannian $n$-manifold with boundary. We combine Gromov's amenable localization technique with the Poincaré duality to study the {\sf traversally generic} geodesic flows on $SM$, the space of the spherical tangent bundle. Such flows generate stratifications of $SM$, governed by rich universal combinatorics. The stratification reflects the ways in which the flow trajectories are tangent to the boundary $\partial(SM)$. Specifically, we get lower estimates of the numbers of connected components of these flow-generated strata of any given codimension $k$ in terms of th…
We show that the Gromov boundary of the free factor graph for the free group Fn with n>2 generators is the space of equivalence classes of minimal very small indecomposable projective Fn-trees without point stabilizer containing a free factor equipped with a quotient topology. Here two such trees are equivalent if the union of their metric completions with their Gromov boundaries are Fn-equivariantly homeomorphic with respect to the observer's topology. The boundary of the cyclic splitting graph is the space of equivalence classes of trees which either are indecomposable or split as very large…
The study of the mapping class group of the plane minus a Cantor set uses a graph of loops, which is an analogous of the curve graph in the study of mapping class groups of compact surfaces. The Gromov boundary of this loop graph can be described in terms of "cliques of high-filling rays": high-filling rays are simple geodesics of the surface which are complicated enough to be infinitely far away from any loop in the graph. Moreover, these rays are arranged in cliques: any two high-filling rays which are both disjoint from a third one are necessarily mutually disjoint. Every such clique is a p…
These notes are the English version of the paper "Hyperbolicité du graphe des rayons et quasi-morphismes sur un gros groupe modulaire". The mapping class group Gamma of the complement of a Cantor set in the plane arises naturally in dynamics. We show that the ray graph, which is the analog of the complex of curves for this surface of infinite type, has infinite diameter and is hyperbolic. We use the action of Gamma on this graph to find an explicit non trivial quasimorphism on Gamma and to show that this group has infinite dimensional second bounded cohomology. Finally we give an example of a …
Let G be a countable group which acts by isometries on a separable, but not necessarily proper, Gromov hyperbolic space X. We say the action of G is weakly hyperbolic if G contains two independent hyperbolic isometries. We show that a random walk on such G converges to the Gromov boundary almost surely. We apply the convergence result to show linear progress and linear growth of translation length, without any assumptions on the moments of the random walk. If the action is acylindrical, and the random walk has finite entropy and finite logarithmic moment, we show that the Gromov boundary with …
To every Gromov hyperbolic space X one can associate a space at infinity called the Gromov boundary of X. Gromov showed that quasi-isometries of hyperbolic metric spaces induce homeomorphisms on their boundaries, thus giving rise to a well-defined notion of the boundary of a hyperbolic group. Croke and Kleiner showed that the visual boundary of non-positively curved (CAT(0)) groups is not well-defined, since quasi-isometric CAT(0) spaces can have non-homeomorphic boundaries. For any sublinear function $κ$, we consider a subset of the visual boundary called the $κ$-Morse boundary and show that …
When 1 -> H -> G -> Q -> 1 is a short exact sequence of three infinite, word-hyperbolic groups, Mahan Mitra (Mj) has shown that the inclusion map from H to G extends continuously to a map between the Gromov boundaries of H and G. This boundary map is known as the Cannon-Thurston map. In this context, Mitra associates to every point z in the Gromov boundary of Q an "ending lamination" on H which consists of pairs of distinct points in the boundary of H. We prove that for each such z, the quotient of the Gromov boundary of H by the equivalence relation generated by this ending lamination is a de…
For every proper geodesic space $X$ we introduce its quasi-geometric boundary $\partial_{QG}X$ with the following properties: 1. Every geodesic ray $g$ in $X$ converges to a point of the boundary $\partial_{QG}X$ and for every point $p$ in $\partial_{QG}X$ there is a geodesic ray in $X$ converging to $p$, 2. The boundary $\partial_{QG}X$ is compact metric, 3. The boundary $\partial_{QG}X$ is an invariant under quasi-isometric equivalences, 4. A quasi-isometric embedding induces a continuous map of quasi-geodesic boundaries, 5. If $X$ is Gromov hyperbolic, then $\partial_{QG}X$ is the Gromov bo…
