We give a diffeomorphism classification of pinched negatively curved manifolds with amenable fundamental groups, namely, they are precisely the Möbius band, and the products of a line with the total spaces of flat vector bundles over closed infranilmanifolds.
We prove that the space of complete, finite volume, pinched negatively curved Riemannian metrics on a smooth high-dimensional manifold is either empty or it is highly non-connected, provided their behavior at infinity is similar.
For a smooth manifold $M$ we define the Teichmüller space $\cT(M)$ of all Riemannian metrics on $M$ and the Teichmüller space $\cT^ε(M)$ of $ε$-pinched negatively curved metrics on $M$, where $0\leqε\leq\infty$. We prove that if $M$ is hyperbolic the natural inclusion $\cT^ε(M)\hookrightarrow\cT(M)$ is, in general, not homotopically trivial. In particular, $\cT^ε(M)$ is, in general, not contractible.
We study how the existence of a negatively pinched Kähler metric on a domain in complex Euclidean space restricts the geometry of its boundary. In particular, we show that if a convex domain admits a complete Kähler metric, with pinched negative holomorphic bisectional curvature outside a compact set, then the boundary of the domain does not contain any complex subvariety of positive domain. Moreover, if the boundary of the domain is smooth, then it is of finite type in the sense of D'Angelo. We also use curvature to provide a characterization of strong pseudoconvexity amongst convex domains. …
We generalize Bonahon's characterization of geometrically infinite torsion-free discrete subgroups of PSL(2, $\mathbb{C}$) to geometrically infinite discrete isometry subgroups in the case of rank 1 symmetric spaces, and, under the assumption of bounded torsion, to the case of negatively pinched Hadamard manifolds. Every such geometrically infinite isometry subgroup $Γ$ has a set of nonconical limit points with cardinality of continuum.
We compute the $L^p$-cohomology spaces of some negatively curved manifolds. We deal with two cases: manifolds with finite volume and sufficiently pinched negative curvature, and conformally compact manifolds.
The fundamental group of a Riemannian manifold with $δ$-pinched negative curvature, $δ>1/4$, cannot be the fundamental group of a quasicompact Kähler manifold. The proof also implies that a non-uniform lattice in $F_{4(-20)}$ cannot be the fundamental group of a quasicompact Kähler manifold. We also construct examples in the spirit of Gromov-Thurston to show that our result is a non-trivial extension of the previously known result that a non-uniform lattice in real hyperbolic space in dimension at least 3 cannot be the fundamental group of a quasicompact Kähler manifold.
In this paper, we generalize Bonahon's characterization of geometrically infinite torsion-free discrete subgroups of PSL(2, $\mathbb{C}$) to geometrically infinite discrete subgroups $Γ$ of isometries of negatively pinched Hadamard manifolds $X$. We then generalize a theorem of Bishop to prove that every discrete geometrically infinite isometry subgroup $Γ$ has a set of nonconical limit points with the cardinality of the continuum.
We prove that a complete Kähler manifold with holomorphic curvature bounded between two negative constants admits a unique complete Kähler-Einstein metric. We also show this metric and the Kobayashi-Royden metric are both uniformly equivalent to the background Kähler metric. Furthermore, all three metrics are shown to be uniformly equivalent to the Bergman metric, if the complete Kähler manifold is simply-connected, with the sectional curvature bounded between two negative constants. In particular, we confirm two conjectures of R. E. Greene and H. Wu posted in 1979.
We show that a noncompact manifold with bounded sectional curvature, whose ends are sufficiently Gromov-Hausdorff close to rays, has a finite dimensional space of square-integrable harmonic forms. In the special case of a finite-volume manifold with pinched negative sectional curvature, we show that the essential spectrum of the p-form Laplacian is the union of the essential spectra of a collection of ordinary differential operators associated to the ends. We give examples of such manifolds with curvature pinched arbitrarily close to -1 and with an infinite number of gaps in the spectrum of th…
We prove that a quasi-isometric map, and more generally a coarse embedding, between pinched Hadamard manifolds is within bounded distance from a unique harmonic map.
In a complete simply connected Riemannian manifold X of pinched negative curvature, we give a sharp criterion for a subset C to be the epsilon-neighbourhood of some convex subset of X, in terms of the extrinsic curvatures of the boundary of C.
A sharp vanishing theorem for the $L^p$ cohomology torsion of Riemannian manifolds with pinched negative curvature is given. It follows that certain negatively curved homogeneous spaces cannot be quasiisometric to better pinched manifolds.
We prove that the existence of one flat horosphere in the universal cover of a closed, strictly quarter pinched, negatively curved Riemannian manifold of dimension n with n greater than or equal to 3, implies that the manifold is homothetic to a real hyperbolic manifold.
We study the asymptotic behaviour of simply connected, Riemannian manifolds $X$ of strictly negative curvature admitting a non-uniform lattice $Γ$. If the quotient manifold $\bar X= Γ\backslash X$ is asymptotically $1/4$-pinched, we prove that $Γ$ is divergent and $U\bar X$ has finite Bowen-Margulis measure (which is then ergodic and totally conservative with respect to the geodesic flow); moreover, we show that, in this case, the volume growth of balls $B(x,R)$ in $X$ is asymptotically equivalent to a purely exponential function $c(x)e^{δR}$, where $δ$ is the topological entropy of the geodes…
Let $X, Y$ be complete, simply connected Riemannian surfaces with pinched negative curvature $-b^2 \leq K \leq -1$. We show that if $f : \partial X \to \partial Y$ is a Moebius homeomorphism between the boundaries at infinity of $X, Y$, then $f$ extends to an isometry $F : X \to Y$. This can be viewed as a generalization of Otal's marked length spectrum rigidity theorem for closed, negatively curved surfaces, in the sense that Otal's theorem asserts that if $X, Y$ admit properly discontinuous, cocompact, free actions by groups of isometries and the boundary map $f$ is Moebius and equivariant w…
We show that the hyperbolization of polyhedra pulls back regular neighborhoods of PL submanifolds. Applying this to the Riemannian version of the hyperbolization due to Ontaneda gives open complete manifolds of pinched negative curvature that are homotopy equivalent to closed smooth manifolds but contain no smooth spines. We also find open complete negatively pinched manifolds that are homotopy equivalent to closed non-smoothable manifolds.
We study complete noncompact long time solutions $(M, g(t))$ to the Kähler-Ricci flow with uniformly bounded nonnegative holomorphic bisectional curvature. We will show that when the Ricci curvature is positive and uniformly pinched, i.e. $ R_\ijb \ge cRg_\ijb$ at $(p,t)$ for all $t$ for some $c>0$, then there always exists a local gradient Kähler Ricci soliton limit around $p$ after possibly rescaling $g(t)$ along some sequence $t_i \to \infty$. We will show as an immediate corollary that the injectivity radius of $g(t)$ along $t_i$ is uniformly bounded from below along $t_i$, and thus $M$ mu…
Let M be a geometrically finite pinched negatively curved Riemannian manifold with at least one cusp. Inspired by the theory of diophantine approximation of a real (or complex) number by rational ones, we develop a theory of approximation of geodesic lines starting from a given cusp by ones returning to it. We define a new invariant for M, the {\it Hurwitz constant} of M. It measures how well all geodesic lines starting from the cusp are approximated by ones returning to it. In the case of constant curvature, we express the Hurwitz constant in terms of lengths of closed geodesics and their dep…
In this short note we survey some results about the fundamental group of a compact negatively curved manifold. In particular, we review a theorem of Gusevskij, it states that the fundamental group of a compact negatively curved manifold does not belong to $\mathcal{C},$ where $\mathcal{C}$ is the smallest class of groups that contains all amenable groups and is closed under free products and finite extensions.
We show that hyperbolic 3-manifolds with finitely generated fundamental group are tame, that is the ends are products. We actually work in slightly greater generality with pinched negatively curved manifolds with hyperbolic cusps. This answers a conjecture of Marden and implies the Ahlfors measure conjecture. Applications are given to other questions about Kleinian groups and 3-manifolds.
Let M be a geometrically finite pinched negatively curved Riemannian manifold with at least one cusp. We study the asymptotics of the number of geodesics in M starting from and returning to a given cusp, and of the number of horoballs at parabolic fixed points in the universal cover of M. In the appendix, due to K. Belabas, the case of SL(2,Z) and of Bianchi groups is developed.
Let $Γ$ be a (non-elementary) convex co-compact group of isometries of a pinched Hadamard manifold $X$. We show that a normal subgroup $Γ_0$ has critical exponent equal to the critical exponent of $Γ$ if and only if $Γ/ Γ_0$ is amenable. We prove a similar result for the exponential growth rate of closed geodesics on $X / Γ$. These statements are analogues of classical results of Kesten for random walks on groups and of Brooks for the spectrum of the Laplacian on covers of Riemannian manifolds.
Let $X$ be a Hadamard manifold with pinched negative curvature $-b^2\leqκ\leq -1$. Suppose $Σ\subseteq X$ is a totally geodesic, codimension-1 submanifold and consider the geodesic flow $Φ^ν_t$ on $X$ generated by a unit normal vector field $ν$ on $Σ$. We say the normal growth exponent of $Σ$ in $X$ is at most $β$ if \[ \lim_{t \rightarrow \pm \infty} \frac{ \Vert d Φ_t^ν\Vert_{\infty} }{ e^{β\vert t \vert}} < \infty, \] where $\Vert d Φ_t^ν\Vert_{\infty} $ is the supremum of the operator norm of $d Φ_t^ν$ over all points of $Σ$. We show that if $Σ$ is bi-Lipschitz to hyperbolic $n$-space $\ma…
We consider the Laplace-Beltrami operator with Dirichlet boundary conditions on convex domains in a Riemannian manifold $(M^n,g)$, and prove that the product of the fundamental gap with the square of the diameter can be arbitrarily small whenever $M^n$ has even a single tangent plane of negative sectional curvature. In particular, the fundamental gap conjecture strongly fails for small deformations of Euclidean space which introduce any negative curvature. We also show that when the curvature is negatively pinched, it is possible to construct such domains of any diameter up to the diameter of …