This is v2, which is 225 pp, as opposed to 170 in the original version. Major changes: 1) a reworking of the theory of simplicial ruled surfaces, 2) extra discussion of the geometry of the convex core boundary in variable negative curvature, and 3) a reworking of Section 10.3, which in the first version relied on an incorrect topological lemma
We construct a geometric decomposition for the convex core of a thick hyperbolic 3-manifold M with bounded rank. Corollaries include upper bounds in terms of rank and injectivity radius on the Heegaard genus of M and on the radius of any embedded ball in the convex core of M.
We show that every closed, virtually fibered hyperbolic 3-manifold contains immersed, quasi-Fuchsian surfaces with convex cores of arbitrarily large thickness.
We show that a complete hyperbolic n-manifold has a geodesic triangulation such that the tetrahedra contained in the thick part are L-bilipschitz diffeomorphic to the standard Euclidean n-simplex, for some constant L depending only on the dimension and the constant used to define the thick-thin decomposition of M.
Some conjectures about Heegaard genera and ranks of fundamental groups of 3-manifolds are formulated, and it is shown that they imply new statements about hyperbolic volume.
We study the geometry of nonrelatively hyperbolic groups. Generalizing a result of Schwartz, any quasi-isometric image of a non-relatively hyperbolic space in a relatively hyperbolic space is contained in a bounded neighborhood of a single peripheral subgroup. This implies that a group being relatively hyperbolic with nonrelatively hyperbolic peripheral subgroups is a quasi-isometry invariant. As an application, Artin groups are relatively hyperbolic if and only if freely decomposable. We also introduce a new quasi-isometry invariant of metric spaces called metrically thick, which is sufficien…
We determine the rank of the fundamental group of those hyperbolic 3-manifolds fibering over the circle whose monodromy is a sufficiently high power of a pseudo-Anosov map. Moreover, we show that any two generating sets with minimal cardinality are Nielsen equivalent.
Carrier graphs were first introduced for closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds by White. In this paper, we first generalize this definition to carrier graphs for representations of a rank two free group into the isometry group of hyperbolic three space. Then we prove the existence and the finiteness of minimal carrier graphs for those representations which are discrete, faithful and geometrically finite, and more generally, those that satisfy certain finiteness conditions first introduced by Bowditch.
In this survey we discuss how geometric methods can be used to study topological properties of 3-manifolds such as their Heegaard genus or the rank of their fundamental group. On the other hand, we also discuss briefly some results relating combinatorial descriptions and geometric properties of hyperbolic 3-manifolds.
We compare the flat geometry associated to a quadratic differential with the hyperbolic geometry associated to the underlying Riemann surface. We show that if a curve is contained in a thick subsurface, then its hyperbolic length is comparable to its flat length times the flat size of the subsurface.
For right-angled Coxeter groups $W_Γ$, we obtain a condition on $Γ$ that is necessary and sufficient to ensure that $W_Γ$ is thick and thus not relatively hyperbolic. We show that Coxeter groups which are not thick all admit canonical minimal relatively hyperbolic structures; further, we show that in such a structure, the peripheral subgroups are both parabolic (in the Coxeter group-theoretic sense) and strongly algebraically thick. We exhibit a polynomial-time algorithm that decides whether a right-angled Coxeter group is thick or relatively hyperbolic. We analyze random graphs in the Erdós-R…
We prove existence of thick geodesic triangulations of hyperbolic 3-manifolds and use this to prove existence of universal bounds on the principal curvatures of surfaces embedded in hyperbolic 3-manifolds.
We show that the diameter of the skinning map of an acylindrical hyperbolic 3-manifold M is bounded on thick Teichmueller geodesic rays by a constant depending only on the thickness of the ray and the topological type of the boundary of M.
We show that for every finite-volume hyperbolic $3$-manifold $M$ and every prime $p$ we have $\text{dim}\ H_1(M;\mathbf{F}_p)< 168.602\cdot\text{vol}\ M$. There are slightly stronger estimates if $p = 2$ or if $M$ is non-compact. This improves on a result proved by Agol, Leininger and Margalit, which gave the same inequality with a coefficient of $334.08$ in place of $168.602$. It also improves on the analogous result with a coefficient of about $260$, which could have been obtained by combining the arguments due to Agol, Leininger and Margalit with a result due to Böröczky. Our inequality inv…
Let $G$ be a word hyperbolic group. We prove that the algebraic $K$-theory groups of $\dbZ [G]$, $K_n(\dbZ[G])$, have finite rank for all $n\in \dbZ$. For a few classes of groups, we give explicit formulas for the ranks of the algebraic $K$-theory groups of their group rings.
In this note, we generalize a theorem of Juan Souto on rank and Nielsen equivalence in the fundamental group of a hyperbolic fibered 3-manifold to a large class of hyperbolic group extensions. This includes all hyperbolic extensions of surfaces groups as well as hyperbolic extensions of free groups by convex cocompact subgroups of Out$(F_n)$.
We prove that every Teichmuller geodesic of a finite type surface contains a string of intersecting long, thick and dominant segments, such that the distance between consecutive segments is bounded. This is key to obtaining some results about Teichmuller geodesics which mimic those for hyperbolic geodesics. These results have important applications to results about the geometry of hyperbolic three-manifolds.
We construct a counterexample to the Rank versus Genus Conjecture, i.e. a closed orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold with rank of its fundamental group smaller than its Heegaard genus. Moreover, we show that the discrepancy between rank and Heegaard genus can be arbitrarily large for hyperbolic 3-manifolds. We also construct toroidal such examples containing hyperbolic JSJ pieces.
We prove that any action of a higher rank lattice on a Gromov-hyperbolic space is elementary. More precisely, it is either elliptic or parabolic. This is a large generalization of the fact that any action of a higher rank lattice on a tree has a fixed point. A consequence is that any quasi-action of a higher rank lattice on a tree is elliptic, i.e. it has Manning's property (QFA). Moreover, we obtain a new proof of the theorem of Farb-Kaimanovich-Masur that any morphism from a higher rank lattice to a mapping class group has finite image, without relying on the Margulis normal subgroup theorem…
A hyperbolic lattice is called \textit{$1.2$-reflective} if the subgroup of its automorphism group generated by all $1$- and $2$-reflections is of finite index. The main result of this article is a complete classification of $1.2$-reflective maximal anisotropic lattices of rank $4$.
Under mild topological restrictions, we obtain new linear upper bounds for the dimension of the mod $p$ homology (for any prime $p$) of a finite-volume orientable hyperbolic $3$ manifold $M$ in terms of its volume. A surprising feature of the arguments in the paper is that they require an application of the Four Color Theorem. If $M$ is closed, and either (a) $π_1(M)$ has no subgroup isomorphic to the fundamental group of a closed, orientable surface of genus $2, 3$ or $4$, or (b) $p = 2$, and $M$ contains no (embedded, two-sided) incompressible surface of genus $2, 3$ or $4$, then $\text{dim}…
Let $G$ be a group and $g$ a non-trivial element in $G$. If some non-empty finite product of conjugates of $g$ equals to the trivial element, then $g$ is called a generalized torsion element. To the best of our knowledge, we have no hyperbolic $3$--manifold groups with generalized torsion elements whose rank is explicitly known to be greater than two. The aim of this short note is to demonstrate that for a given integer $n > 1$ there are infinitely many closed hyperbolic $3$--manifolds $M_n$ which enjoy the property: (i) the Heegaard genus of $M_n$ is $n$, (ii) the rank of the fundamental grou…
We investigate the geometry of closed, orientable, hyperbolic $3$-manifolds whose fundamental groups are $k$-free for a given integer $k\ge 3$. We show that any such manifold $M$ contains a point $P$ of $M$ with the following property: If $S$ is the set of elements of $π_1(M,P)$ represented by loops of length $<\log(2k-1)$, then for every subset $T \subset S$, we have ${\rm rank}\ T \le k-3$. This generalizes to all $k\ge3$ results proved in [6] and [10], which have been used to relate the volume of a hyperbolic manifold to its topological properties, and it strictly improves on the result obt…
A hyperbolic lattice is called \textit{$(1{,}2)$-reflective} if its automorphism group is generated by $1$- and $2$-reflections up to finite index. In this paper we prove that the fundamental polyhedron of a $\mathbb{Q}$-arithmetic cocompact reflection group in the three-dimensional Lobachevsky space contains an edge such that the distance between its framing faces is small enough. Using this fact we obtain a classification of $(1{,}2)$-reflective anisotropic hyperbolic lattices of rank $4$.
Baker and Riley proved that a free group of rank 3 can be contained in a hyperbolic group as a subgroup for which the Cannon-Thurston map is not well-defined. By using their result, we show that the phenomenon occurs for not only a free group of rank 3 but also every non-elementary hyperbolic group. In fact it is shown that a similar phenomenon occurs for every non-elementary relatively hyperbolic group.
We develop and study quaternionic and octonionic analogies of Cartan angular and Toledo invariants that are well known in the complex hyperbolic space. Using such invariants we study quasifuchsian deformations (including bendings) of quaternionic and octonionic hyperbolic manifolds.
We study the variety of actions of a fixed (Chevalley) group on arbitrary geodesic, Gromov hyperbolic spaces. In high rank we obtain a complete classification. In rank one, we obtain some partial results and give a conjectural picture.
We construct nonlinear hyperbolic groups which are large, torsion-free, one-ended, and admit a finite $K(π,1)$. Our examples are built from superrigid cocompact rank one lattices via amalgamated free products and HNN extensions.
The rank of a hierarchically hyperbolic space is the maximal number of unbounded factors in a standard product region. For hierarchically hyperbolic groups, this coincides with the maximal dimension of a quasiflat. Examples for which the rank coincides with familiar quantities include: the dimension of maximal Dehn twist flats for mapping class groups, the maximal rank of a free abelian subgroup for right-angled Coxeter and Artin groups, and, for the Weil--Petersson metric, the rank is the integer part of half the complex dimension of Teichmüller space. We prove that any quasiflat of dimension…
We show that if the totally geodesic boundary of a compact hyperbolic 3-manifold M has a large collar of depth d, then the diameter of the skinning map of M is no more than A exp(-d) for some A depending only on the genus and injectivity radius of the boundary of M.
Anosov representations of word hyperbolic groups into higher-rank semisimple Lie groups are representations with finite kernel and discrete image that have strong analogies with convex cocompact representations into rank-one Lie groups. However, the most naive analogy fails: generically, Anosov representations do not act properly and cocompactly on a convex set in the associated Riemannian symmetric space. We study representations into projective indefinite orthogonal groups PO(p,q) by considering their action on the associated pseudo-Riemannian hyperbolic space H^{p,q-1} in place of the Riema…
In this survey paper, we outline the proofs of the rigidity results for simple, thick, hyperbolic P-manifolds found in our three earlier papers math.GR/0506518, math.GT/0410476, and math.GR/0409586. We discuss how the arguments change in the two, three, and higher dimensional settings. This paper was written for the 22nd Annual Workshop in Geometric Topology (Colorado Springs, June 2005).
Let $X$ be a negatively curved symmetric space and $Γ$ a non-cocompact lattice in $\rm{Isom}(X)$. We show that small, parabolic-preserving deformations of $Γ$ into the isometry group of any negatively curved symmetric space containing $X$ remain discrete and faithful (the cocompact case is due to Guichard). This applies in particular to a version of Johnson-Millson bending deformations, providing for all $n$ infnitely many non-cocompact lattices in ${\rm SO}(n,1)$ which admit discrete and faithful deformations into ${\rm SU}(n,1)$. We also produce deformations of the figure-8 knot group into $…
We prove that simple, thick hyperbolic P-manifolds of dimension >2 exhibit Mostow rigidity. We also prove a quasi-isometry rigidity result for the fundamental groups of simple, thick hyperbolic P-manifolds of dimension >2. The key tool in the proofs of these rigidity results is a strong form of the Jordan separation theorem, for maps from S^n to S^{n+1} which are not necessarily injective.