In this paper it is proved that relative hyperbolicity is an invariant of quasi-isometry. As a byproduct of the arguments, simplified definitions of relative hyperbolicity are obtained. In particular we obtain a new definition very similar to the one of hyperbolicity, relying on the existence for every quasi-geodesic triangle of a central left coset of peripheral subgroup.
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 show that a large class of right-angled Artin groups (in particular, those with planar complementary defining graph) can be embedded quasi-isometrically in pure braid groups and in the group of area preserving diffeomorphisms of the disk fixing the boundary (with respect to the $L^2$-norm metric); this extends results of Benaim and Gambaudo who gave quasi-isometric embeddings of $F\_n$ and $\Z^n$ for all $n>0$. As a consequence we are also able to embed a variety of Gromov hyperbolic groups quasi-isometrically in pure braid groups and in the diffeomorphism group of the disk. Examples includ…
We describe the kernel of the canonical map from the Floyd boundary of a relatively hyperbolic group to its Bowditch boundary. Using our methods we then prove that a finitely generated group $H$ admitting a quasi-isometric map $ϕ$ into a relatively hyperbolic group $G$ is relatively hyperbolic with respect to a system of subgroups whose image under $ϕ$ is situated in a uniformly bounded distance from the parabolic subgroups of $G$.
We abstract the notion of an A/QI triple from a number of examples in geometric group theory. Such a triple (G,X,H) consists of a group G acting on a Gromov hyperbolic space X, acylindrically along a finitely generated subgroup H which is quasi-isometrically embedded by the action. Examples include strongly quasi-convex subgroups of relatively hyperbolic groups, convex cocompact subgroups of mapping class groups, many known convex cocompact subgroups of Out(Fn), and groups generated by powers of independent loxodromic WPD elements of a group acting on a Gromov hyperbolic space. We initiate the…
We prove asymptotically isometric, coarsely geodesic metrics on a toral relatively hyperbolic group are coarsely equal. The theorem applies to all lattices in SO(n,1). This partly verifies a conjecture by Margulis. In the case of hyperbolic groups/spaces, our result generalizes a theorem by Furman and a theorem by Krat. We discuss an application to the isospectral problem for the length spectrum of Riemannian manifolds. The positive answer to this problem has been known for several cases. All of them have hyperbolic fundamental groups. We do not solve the isospectral problem in the original se…
We show that every non-elementary hyperbolic group $\G$ admits a proper affine isometric action on $L^p(\bd\G\times \bd\G)$, where $\bd\G$ denotes the boundary of $\G$ and $p$ is large enough. Our construction involves a $\G$-invariant measure on $\bd\G\times \bd\G$ analogous to the Bowen - Margulis measure from the CAT$(-1)$ setting, as well as a geometric cocycle à la Busemann. We also deduce that $\G$ admits a proper affine isometric action on the first $\ell^p$-cohomology group $H^1_{(p)}(\G)$ for large enough $p$.
We show that the continuous $L^p$-cohomology of locally compact second countable groups is a quasi-isometric invariant. As an application, we prove partial results supporting a positive answer to a question asked by M.~Gromov, suggesting a classical behaviour of continuous $L^p$-cohomology of simple real Lie groups. In addition to quasi-isometric invariance, the ingredients are a spectral sequence argument and Pansu's vanishing results for real hyperbolic spaces. In the best adapted cases of simple Lie groups, we obtain nearly half of the relevant vanishings.
We describe the quasi-isometric classification of fundamental groups of irreducible non-geometric 3-manifolds which do not have "too many" arithmetic hyperbolic geometric components, thus completing the quasi-isometric classification of 3--manifold groups in all but a few exceptional cases.
We construct examples of quasi-isometric embeddings of word hyperbolic groups into $\mathsf{SL}(d,\mathbb{R})$ for $d \geqslant 5$ which are not limits of Anosov representations into $\mathsf{SL}(d,\mathbb{R})$. As a consequence, we conclude that an analogue of the density theorem for $\mathsf{PSL}(2,\mathbb{C})$ does not hold for $\mathsf{SL}(d,\mathbb{R})$ when $d \geqslant 5$.
We show that for any group $G$ that is hyperbolic relative to subgroups that admit a proper affine isometric action on a uniformly convex Banach space, then $G$ acts properly on a uniformly convex Banach space as well.
We study isometric actions of tree automorphism groups on the infinite-dimensional hyperbolic spaces. On the one hand, we exhibit a general one-parameter family of such representations and analyse the corresponding equivariant embeddings of the trees, showing that they are convex-cocompact and asymptotically isometric. On the other hand, focusing on the case of sufficiently transitive groups of automorphisms of locally finite trees, we classify completely all irreducible representations by isometries of hyperbolic spaces. It turns out that in this case our one-parameter family exhausts all non…
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 define and develop the notion of a discretisable quasi-action. It is shown that a cobounded quasi-action on a proper non-elementary hyperbolic space $X$ not fixing a point of $\partial X$ is quasi-conjugate to an isometric action on either a rank one symmetric space or a locally finite graph. Topological completions of quasi-actions are also introduced. Discretisable quasi-actions are used to give several instances where commensurated subgroups are preserved by quasi-isometries. For example, the class of $\mathbb{Z}$-by-hyperbolic groups is shown to be quasi-isometrically rigid. We characte…
In the spirit of peripheral subgroups in relatively hyperbolic groups, we exhibit a simple class of quasi-isometrically rigid subgroups in graph products of finite groups, which we call eccentric subgroups. As an application, we prove that, if two right-angled Coxeter groups $C(Γ_1)$ and $C(Γ_2)$ are quasi-isometric, then for any minsquare subgraph $Λ_1 \leq Γ_1$ there exists a minsquare subgraph $Λ_2 \leq Γ_2$ such that the right-angled Coxeter groups $C(Λ_1)$ and $C(Λ_2)$ are quasi-isometric as well. Various examples of non-quasi-isometric groups are deduced. Our arguments are based on a stu…
A group $Γ$ with a family of subgroups $\mathbb{P}$ is relatively hyperbolic if $Γ$ admits a cusp-uniform action on a proper $δ$--hyperbolic space. We show that any two such spaces for a given group pair are quasi-isometric, provided the spaces have "constant horospherical distortion," a condition satisfied by Groves--Manning's cusped Cayley graph and by all negatively curved symmetric spaces. Consequently the Bowditch boundary admits a canonical quasisymmetric structure, which coincides with the "naturally occurring" quasisymmetric structure of the symmetric space when considering lattices in…
We introduce the co-surface graph $\mathcal{CS}$ of a finitely generated free group $\mathbb{F}$ and use it to study the geometry of hyperbolic group extensions of $\mathbb{F}$. Among other things, we show that the Gromov boundary of the co-surface graph is equivariantly homeomorphic to the space of free arational $\mathbb{F}$-trees and use this to prove that a finitely generated subgroup of $\mathrm{Out}(\mathbb{F})$ quasi-isometrically embeds into the co-surface graph if and only if it is purely atoroidal and quasi-isometrically embeds into the free factor complex. This answers a question of…
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 prove the equivalence between a relative bottleneck property and being quasi-isometric to a tree-graded space. As a consequence, we deduce that the quasi-trees of spaces defined axiomatically by Bestvina-Bromberg-Fujiwara are quasi-isometric to tree-graded spaces. Using this we prove that mapping class groups quasi-isometrically embed into a finite product of simplicial trees. In particular, these groups have finite Assouad-Nagata dimension, direct embeddings exhibiting $\ell^p$ compression exponent $1$ for all $p\geq 1$ and they quasi-isometrically embed into $\ell^1(\mathbb N)$. We deduce…
Let S be a closed surface of genus at least 2. We show that a finitely generated group G which is an extension of the fundamental group H of S is word hyperbolic if and only the orbit map of the quotient group G/H on the complex of curves is a quasi-isometric embedding.This in turn is equivalent to G/H being convex cocompact in the sense of Farb and Mosher.
We show that any group that is hyperbolic relative to virtually nilpotent subgroups, and does not admit peripheral splittings, contains a quasi-isometrically embedded copy of the hyperbolic plane. In natural situations, the specific embeddings we find remain quasi-isometric embeddings when composed with the inclusion map from the Cayley graph to the coned-off graph, as well as when composed with the quotient map to "almost every" peripheral (Dehn) filling. We apply our theorem to study the same question for fundamental groups of 3-manifolds. The key idea is to study quantitative geometric prop…
Let M denote either Euclidean or hyperbolic n-space, and let G be a discrete group of isometries of M, with the property that G respects and acts tile-transitively on a convex-polyhedral tesselation of M. Given an arbitrary base point p in M, we consider the orbit Gp in M and define a notion of "G-polyhedral pieces" S in Gp. The objects of our interest are the groups pi(S) of all piecewise G-isometric permutations on S. In this paper we merely present the two most basic examples, and these play rather different roles: The case when G = PSL(2,Z) acting on the hyperbolic plane reveals that the "…
Following the work of Rosendal and Mann and Rafi, we try to answer the following question: when is the mapping class group of an infinite-type surface quasi-isometric to a graph whose vertices are curves on that surface? With the assumption of tameness as defined by Mann and Rafi, we describe a necessary and sufficient condition, called translatability, for a geometrically nontrivial big mapping class group to admit such a quasi-isometry. In addition, we show that the mapping class group of the plane minus a Cantor set is quasi-isometric to the loop graph defined by Bavard, which we believe re…
Through the glasses of didactic reduction: We consider a (periodic) tessellation $Δ$ of either Euclidean or hyperbolic $n$-space $M$. By a piecewise isometric rearrangement of $Δ$ we mean the process of cutting $M$ along corank-1 tile-faces into finitely many convex polyhedral pieces, and rearranging the pieces to a new tight covering of the tessellation $Δ$. Such a rearrangement defines a permutation of the (centers of the) tiles of $Δ$, and we are interested in the group $PI(Δ)$ of all piecewise isometric rearrangements of $Δ$. In this paper we offer: a) An illustration of piecewise isometri…
We define a complete Riemannian manifold X to be large-scale conformally rigid if all groups that are quasi-isometric to some complete Riemannian manifold of bounded geometry conformal to X are quasi-isometric to X. We prove that many 3-manifolds, including Euclidean 3-space, hyperbolic 3-space and the product of the hyperbolic plane with the real line are large-scale conformally rigid. This implies new characterizations of groups that can act properly, cocompactly by isometries on those manifolds.
In this article, we state and prove a general criterion allowing us to show that some groups are hyperbolically elementary, meaning that every isometric action of one of these groups on a Gromov-hyperbolic space either fixes a point at infinity or has bounded orbits. Also, we show how such a hyperbolic rigidity leads to fixed-point properties on finite-dimensional CAT(0) cube complexes. As an application, we prove that Thompson's group $V$ is hyperbolically elementary, and we deduce that it satisfies Property $(FW_{\infty})$, ie., every isometric action of $V$ on a finite-dimensional CAT(0) cu…
We show that a relatively hyperbolic group quasi-isometrically embeds in a product of finitely many trees if the peripheral subgroups do, and we provide an estimate on the minimal number of trees needed. Applying our result to the case of 3-manifolds, we show that fundamental groups of closed 3-manifolds have linearly controlled asymptotic dimension at most 8. To complement this result, we observe that fundamental groups of Haken 3-manifolds with non-empty boundary have asymptotic dimension 2.
We present some explicit constructions of universal R-trees with applications to the asymptotic geometry of hyperbolic spaces. In particular, we show that any asymptotic cone of a complete simply connected manifold of negative curvature is a complete homogeneous R-tree with the valency $2^{\aleph_0}$ at every point. It implies that all these asymptotic cones are isometric depending neither on a manifold nor on an ultrafilter. It is also proved that the same R-tree can be isometrically embedded at infinity into such a manifold or into a non-abelian free group.
On the one hand, we construct a continuous family of non-isometric proper CAT(-1) spaces on which the isometry group ${\rm Isom}(\mathbf{H}^{n})$ of the real hyperbolic $n$-space acts minimally and cocompactly. This provides the first examples of non-standard CAT(0) model spaces for simple Lie groups. On the other hand, we classify all continuous non-elementary actions of ${\rm Isom}(\mathbf{H}^{n})$ on the infinite-dimensional real hyperbolic space. It turns out that they are in correspondence with the exotic model spaces that we construct.
Suppose G is a Gromov hyperbolic group, and the boundary at infinity of G is quasisymmetrically homeomorphic to an Ahlfors Q-regular metric 2-sphere Z with Ahlfors regular conformal dimension Q. Then G acts discretely, cocompactly, and isometrically on hyperbolic 3-space.
A quasi-tree is a geodesic metric space quasi-isometric to a tree. We give a general construction of many actions of groups on quasi-trees. The groups we can handle include non-elementary (relatively) hyperbolic groups, rank 1 CAT(0) groups, mapping class groups and Out(Fn). As an application, we show that mapping class groups act on finite products of δ-hyperbolic spaces so that orbit maps are quasi-isometric embeddings. We prove that mapping class groups have finite asymptotic dimension.
Let $G$ be a relatively hyperbolic group that admits a decomposition into a finite graph of relatively hyperbolic groups structure with quasi-isometrically (qi) embedded condition. We prove that the set of conjugates of all the vertex and edge groups satisfy the limit set intersection property for conical limit points. This result is motivated by the work of Sardar for graph of hyperbolic groups.
We show that every Gromov hyperbolic group $\Ga$ admits a quasi-isometric embedding into the product of $(n+1)$ binary trees, where $n=\dim\di\Ga$ is the topological dimension of the boundary at infinity of $\Ga$.
Sela introduced limit groups in his work on the Tarski problem, and showed that each limit group has a cyclic hierarchy. In this paper, a class of relatively hyperbolic groups, equipped with a hierarchy similar to the one for limit groups, is shown to be closed under quasi-isometry. Additionally, these groups share some of the properties of limit groups. In particular, groups quasi-isometric to limit groups are shown to be LERF and virtually toral relatively hyperbolic.
We study the quasi-isometric rigidity of a large family of finitely generated groups that split as graphs of groups with virtually free vertex groups and two-ended edge groups. Let $G$ be a group that is one-ended, hyperbolic relative to virtually abelian subgroups, and has JSJ decomposition over two-ended subgroups containing only virtually free vertex groups that aren't quadratically hanging. Our main result is that any group quasi-isometric to $G$ is abstractly commensurable to $G$. In particular, our result applies to certain "generic" HNN extensions of a free group over cyclic subgroups.
If one tries to embed a metric space uniformly in Hilbert space, how close to quasi-isometric could the embedding be? We answer this question for finite dimensional CAT(0) cube complexes and for hyperbolic groups. In particular, we show that the Hilbert space compression of any hyperbolic group is 1.
Given isometric actions by a group G on finitely many δ-hyperbolic metric spaces, we provide a sufficient condition that guarantees the existence of a single element in G that is hyperbolic for each action. As an application we prove a conjecture of Handel and Mosher regarding relatively fully irreducible subgroups and elements in the outer automorphism group of a free group.
We give an algorithm for solving equations and inequations with rational constraints in virtually free groups. Our algorithm is based on Rips classification of measured band complexes. Using canonical representatives, we deduce an algorithm for solving equations and inequations in hyperbolic groups (maybe with torsion). Additionnally, we can deal with quasi-isometrically embeddable rational constraints.
A group with a geometric action on some hyperbolic space is necessarily word hyperbolic, but on the other hand every countable group acts (metrically) properly by isometries on a locally finite hyperbolic graph. In this paper we consider what happens when a group acts isometrically on a restricted class of hyperbolic spaces, for instance quasitrees. We obtain strong conclusions on the group structure if the action has a locally finite orbit, especially if the group is finitely generated. We also look at group actions on finite products of quasitrees, where our actions may be by automorphisms o…
We say that a finitely generated group $G$ has property (QT) if it acts isometrically on a finite product of quasi-trees so that orbit maps are quasi-isometric embeddings. A quasi-tree is a connected graph with path metric quasi-isometric to a tree, and product spaces are equipped with the $\ell^1$-metric. As an application of the projection complex techniques, we prove that residually finite hyperbolic groups and mapping class groups have (QT).
We show that Artin groups of extra-large type, and more generally Artin groups of large and hyperbolic type, are hierarchically hyperbolic. This implies in particular that these groups have finite asymptotic dimension and uniform exponential growth. We prove these results by using a combinatorial approach to hierarchical hyperbolicity, via the action of these groups on a new complex that is quasi-isometric both to the coned-off Deligne complex introduced by Martin-Przytycki and to a generalisation due to Morris-Wright of the graph of irreducible parabolic subgroups of finite type introduced by…
We investigate the class of locally compact lacunary hyperbolic groups. We prove that if a locally compact compactly generated group G admits one asymptotic cone that is a real tree and whose natural transitive isometric action is focal, then G must be a focal hyperbolic group. As an application, we characterize connected Lie groups and linear algebraic groups over an ultrametric local field of characteristic zero having cut-points in one asymptotic cone. We prove several results for locally compact lacunary hyperbolic groups, and extend the characterization of finitely generated lacunary hype…