We show that if G is an admissible group acting geometrically on a CAT(0) space X, then G is a hierarchically hyperbolic space and with mild assumptions the sublinearly-Morse boundary of the group is a topological model for associated Poisson boundaries .
Given a sublinear function $κ$, $κ$-Morse boundaries $\pka X$ of proper \CAT spaces are introduced by Qing, Rafi and Tiozzo. It is a topological space that consists of a large set of quasi-geodesic rays and it is quasi-isometrically invariant and metrizable. In this paper, we study the sublinearly Morse boundaries with the assumption that there is a proper cocompact action of a group $G$ on the \CAT space in question. We show that $G$ acts minimally on $\pka G$ and that contracting elements of $G$ induces a weak north-south dynamic on $\pka G$. Furthermore, we show that a homeomorphism $f \fro…
We introduce the notion of k-lower divergence for geodesic rays in CAT(0) spaces. Building on the work of Charney and Sultan we give various characterizations of k-contracting geodesic rays using k-lower divergence and k-slim triangles. We also characterize k-contracting geodesic rays in CAT(0) cube complexes using sequences of well-separated hyperplanes.
We prove that the sublinearly Morse boundary of every known cubulated group continuously injects in the Gromov boundary of a certain hyperbolic graph. We also show that for all CAT(0) cube complexes, convergence to sublinearly Morse geodesic rays has a simple combinatorial description using the hyperplanes crossed by such sequences. As an application of this combinatorial description, we show that a certain subspace of the Roller boundary continously surjects on the subspace of the visual boundary consisting of sublinearly Morse geodesic rays.
We show that the sublinearly Morse boundary of a CAT(0) cubical group with a factor system is well-defined up to homeomorphism with respect to the visual topology. The key tool used in the proof is a new topology on sublinearly Morse boundaries that is induced by group actions on hyperbolic spaces that are sufficiently nice, for example, largest acylindrical actions. Using the same techniques, we obtain a explicit description of this new topology on the sublinearly Morse boundary of any hierarchically hyperbolic group in terms of medians. Finally, we explicitly describe the sublinear Morse bou…
We show that the sublinearly Morse directions in the visual boundary of a rank-1 CAT(0) space with a geometric group action are generic in several commonly studied senses of the word, namely with respect to Patterson-Sullivan measures and stationary measures for random walks. We deduce that the sublinearly Morse boundary is a model of the Poisson boundary for finitely supported random walks on groups acting geometrically on rank-1 CAT (0) spaces. We prove an analogous result for mapping class group actions on Teichmüller space. Our main technical tool is a criterion, valid in any unique geodes…
A sublinear biLipschitz equivalence (SBE) between metric spaces is a map from one space to another that distorts distances with bounded multiplicative constants and sublinear additive error. Given any sublinear function $κ$, $κ$-Morse boundaries are defined for all geodesic proper metric spaces as a quasi-isometrically invariant and metrizable topological space of quasi-geodesic rays. In this paper, we prove that $κ$-Morse boundaries of proper geodesic metric spaces are invariant under suitable SBEs. A tool in the proof is the use of sublinear rays, that is, sublinear bilispchitz embeddings of…
We introduce and begin a systematic study of sublinearly contracting projections. We give two characterizations of Morse quasi-geodesics in an arbitrary geodesic metric space. One is that they are sublinearly contracting; the other is that they have completely superlinear divergence. We give a further characterization of sublinearly contracting projections in terms of projections of geodesic segments.
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 …
Random walks on spaces with hyperbolic properties tend to sublinearly track geodesic rays which point in certain hyperbolic-like directions. Qing-Rafi-Tiozzo recently introduced the sublinearly Morse boundary and proved that this boundary is a quasi-isometry invariant which captures a notion of generic direction in a broad context. In this article, we develop the geometric foundations of sublinear Morseness in the mapping class group and Teichmüller space. We prove that their sublinearly Morse boundaries are visibility spaces and admit continuous equivariant injections into the boundary of the…
Behrstock and Druţu raised a question about the existence of Morse geodesics in $CAT(0)$ spaces with divergence function strictly greater than $r^n$ and strictly less than $r^{n+1}$, where $n$ is an integer greater than $1$. In this paper, we answer the question of Behrstock and Druţu by showing that for each real number $s\geq 2$, there is a $CAT(0)$ space $X$ with a proper and cocompact action of some finitely generated group such that $X$ contains a Morse bi-infinite geodesic with the divergence equivalent to $r^s$.
We construct a CAT(0) group containing a finitely presented subgroup with infinitely many conjugacy classes of finite-order elements. Unlike previous examples (which were based on right-angled Artin groups) our ambient CAT(0) group does not contain any rank 3 free abelian subgroups. We also construct examples of groups of type F_n inside mapping class groups, Aut(F), and Out(F) which have infinitely many conjugacy classes of finite-order elements.
We construct a hyperbolic group with a finitely presented subgroup, which has infinitely many conjugacy classes of finite-order elements. We also use a version of Morse theory with high dimensional horizontal cells and use handle cancellation arguments to produce other examples of subgroups of CAT(0) groups with infinitely many conjugacy classes of finite-order elements.
The Morse boundary of a proper geodesic metric space is designed to encode hypberbolic-like behavior in the space. A key property of this boundary is that a quasi-isometry between two such spaces induces a homeomorphism on their Morse boundaries. In this paper we investigate when the converse holds. We prove that for cocompact CAT(0) spaces, a homeomorphism of Morse boundaries is induced by a quasi-isometry if and only if the homeomorphism is quasi-mobius and 2-stable.
We construct an equivariant version of discrete Morse theory for simplicial complexes endowed with group actions. The key ingredient is a 2-categorical criterion for making acyclic partial matchings on the quotient space compatible with an overlaid complex of groups. We use the discrete flow category of any such compatible matching to build the corresponding Morse complex of groups. Our main result establishes that the development of the Morse complex of groups recovers the original simplicial complex up to equivariant homotopy equivalence.
Let $X$ be a proper geodesic metric space and let $G$ be a group of isometries of $X$ which acts geometrically. Cordes constructed the Morse boundary of $X$ which generalizes the contracting boundary for CAT(0) spaces and the visual boundary for hyperbolic spaces. We characterize Morse elements in $G$ by their fixed points on the Morse boundary $\partial_MX$. The dynamics on the Morse boundary is very similar to that of a $δ$-hyperbolic space. In particular, we show that the action of $G$ on $\partial_MX$ is minimal if $G$ is not virtually cyclic. We also get a uniform convergence result on th…
We prove that in CAT(0) spaces a quasi-geodesic is Morse if and only if it is contracting. Specifically, in our main theorem we prove that for $γ$ a quasi-geodesic in a CAT(0) space X, the following four statements are equivalent: (i) $γ$ is Morse, (ii) $γ$ is (b,c)--contracting, (iii), $γ$ is strongly contracting, and (iv) in every asymptotic cone $X_ω,$ any two distinct points in the ultralimit $γ_ω$ are separated by a cutpoint. As a corollary, we provide a converse to the usual Morse stability lemma in the CAT(0) setting. In addition, as a warm up we include an alternative proof of the fact…
This paper introduces a new class of right-angled Coxeter groups with totally disconnected Morse boundaries. We construct this class recursively by examining how the Morse boundary of a right-angled Coxeter group changes if we glue a graph to its defining graph. More generally, we present a method to construct amalgamated free products of CAT(0) groups with totally disconnected Morse boundaries that act geometrically on CAT(0) spaces that have a treelike block decomposition.
This paper is a survey dedicated to the following question: given a group acting on some CAT(0) cube complex, how to exploit this action to determine whether or not the group is Gromov / relatively / acylindrically hyperbolic? As much as possible, the different criteria we mention are illustrated by applications. We also propose a model for universal acylindrical actions of cubulable groups and give a few applications to Morse, stable and hyperbolically embedded subgroups.
We give new examples of hyperbolic and relatively hyperbolic groups of cohomological dimension $d$ for all $d\geq 4$. These examples result from applying CAT$(0)$/CAT$(-1)$ filling constructions (based on singular doubly warped products) to finite volume hyperbolic manifolds with toral cusps. The groups obtained have a number of interesting properties, which are established by analyzing their boundaries at infinity by a kind of Morse-theoretic technique, related to but distinct from ordinary and combinatorial Morse theory.
Bieri, Geoghegan and Kochloukova computed the BNSR-invariants $Σ^m(F)$ of Thompson's group $F$ for all $m$. We recompute these using entirely geometric techniques, making use of the Stein--Farley CAT(0) cube complex on which $F$ acts.
We generalize a result of Paulin on the Gromov boundary of hyperbolic groups to the Morse boundary of proper, maximal hierarchically hyperbolic spaces admitting cocompact group actions by isometries. Namely we show that if the Morse boundaries of two such spaces each contain at least three points, then the spaces are quasi-isometric if and only if there exists a 2-stable, quasi-möbius homeomorphism between their Morse boundaries. Our result extends a recent result of Charney-Murray, who prove such a classification for CAT(0) groups, and is new for mapping class groups and the fundamental group…
We compare several topologies on the Morse boundary $\partial_M Y$ of a $\mathrm{CAT(0)}$ cube complex $Y$. In particular, we show that the two topologies introduced by Cashen and Mackay are not equal in general and provide a new description of one of them in the language of cube complexes. As a corollary, we obtain a new approach to tackle the question whether the visual topology induces a quasi-isometry-invariant topology on the Morse boundary. This leads to an obstruction to quasi-isometry-invariance in terms of the behaviour of geodesics under quasi-isometries.
We prove that Morse local-to-global groups grow exponentially faster than their infinite index stable subgroups. This generalizes a result of Dahmani, Futer, and Wise in the context of quasi-convex subgroups of hyperbolic groups to a broad class of groups that contains the mapping class group, CAT(0) groups, and the fundamental groups of closed 3-manifolds. To accomplish this, we develop a theory of automatic structures on Morse geodesics in Morse local-to-global groups. Other applications of these automatic structures include a description of stable subgroups in terms of regular languages, ra…
We formalize an equivariant version of Bestvina-Brady discrete Morse theory, and apply it to Vietoris-Rips complexes in order to exhibit finite universal spaces for proper actions for all asymptotically CAT(0) groups.
We show the mapping class group, CAT(0) groups, the fundamental groups of closed 3-manifolds, and certain relatively hyperbolic groups have a local-to-global property for Morse quasi-geodesics. This allows us to generalize combination theorems of Gitik for quasiconvex subgroups of hyperbolic groups to the stable subgroups of these groups. In the case of the mapping class group, this gives combination theorems for convex cocompact subgroups. We show a number of additional consequences of this local-to-global property, including a Cartan-Hadamard type theorem for detecting hyperbolicity locally …
We inspect Vietoris-Rips complexes $VR_t(X)$ of certain metric spaces $X$ using a new generalization of Bestvina-Brady discrete Morse theory. Our main result is a pair of metric criteria on $X$, called the Morse Criterion and Link Criterion, that allow us to deduce information about the homotopy types of certain $VR_t(X)$. One application is to topological data analysis, specifically persistence of homotopy type for certain Vietoris-Rips complexes. For example we recover some results of Adamaszek-Adams and Hausmann regarding homotopy types of $VR_t(S^n)$. Another application is to geometric gr…
In the 1980's Pierre Julg and Alain Valette, and also Tadeusz Pytlik and Ryszard Szwarc, constructed and studied a certain Fredholm operator associated to a simplicial tree. The operator can be defined in at least two ways: from a combinatorial flow on the tree, similar to the flows in Forman's discrete Morse theory, or from the theory of unitary operator-valued coccyges. There are applications of the theory surrounding the operator to C*-algebra K-theory, to the theory of completely bounded representations of groups that act on trees, and to the Selberg principle in the representation theory …