Morse theory and conjugacy classes of finite subgroups

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(), and Out() which have infinitely many conjugacy classes of finite-order elements.      

Stallings’ folds for cube complexes

We describe a higher dimensional analogue of Stallings’ folding sequences for group actions on CAT(0) cube complexes. We use it to give a characterization of quasiconvex subgroups of hyperbolic groups that act properly and cocompactly on CAT(0) cube complexes via finiteness properties of their hyperplane stabilizers.     

On splitting theorems for CAT(0) spaces and compact geodesic spaces of non-positive curvature

In this paper, we show some splitting theorems for CAT(0) spaces on which a product group acts geometrically and we obtain a splitting theorem for compact geodesic spaces of non-positive curvature. A CAT(0) group Γ is said to be rigid, if Γ determines its boundary up to homeomorphisms of a CAT(0) space on which Γ acts geometrically. C. Croke and B. Kleiner have constructed a non-rigid CAT(0) group. As an application of the splitting theorems for CAT(0) spaces, we obtain that if Γ₁ and Γ₂ are rigid CAT(0) groups then so is Γ₁ × Γ₂.     

Cell-like equivalences and boundaries of CAT(0) groups

In 2000, Croke and Kleiner showed that a CAT(0) group G can admit more than one boundary. This contrasted with the situation for ??-hyperbolic groups, where it was well-known that each such group admitted a unique boundary??in a very stong sense. Prior to Croke and Kleiner??s discovery, it had been observed by Geoghegan and Bestvina that a weaker sort of uniquness does hold for boundaries of torsion free CAT(0) groups; in particular, any two such boundaries always have the same shape. Hence, the boundary really does carry significant information about the group itself. In an attempt to strengthen the correspondence between group and boundary, Bestvina asked whether boundaries of CAT(0) groups are unique up to cell-like equivalence. For the types of space that arise as boundaries of CAT(0) groups, this is a notion that is weaker than topological equivalence and stronger than shape equivalence. In this paper we explore the Bestvina Cell-like Equivalence Question. We describe a straightforward strategy with the potential for providing a fully general positive answer. We apply that strategy to a number of test cases and show that it succeeds??often in unexpectedly interesting ways.     

Hilbert space compression and exactness of discrete groups

We show that the Hilbert space compression of any (unbounded) finite-dimensional CAT(0) cube complex is 1 and deduce that any finitely generated group acting properly, co-compactly on a CAT(0) cube complex is exact, and hence has Yu's Property A. The class of groups covered by this theorem includes free groups, finitely generated Coxeter groups, finitely generated right angled Artin groups, finitely presented groups satisfying the B(4)-T(4) small cancellation condition and all those word-hyperbolic groups satisfying the B(6) condition. Another family of examples is provided by certain canonical surgeries defined by link diagrams.     

Distortion of Surface Groups in CAT(0) free-by-cyclic Groups

Given a non-positively curved 2-complex with a circle-valued Morse function satisfying some extra combinatorial conditions, we describe how to locally isometrically embed this in a larger non-positively curved 2-complex with free-by-cyclic fundamental group. This embedding procedure is used to produce examples of CAT(0) free-by-cyclic groups that contain closed hyperbolic surface subgroups with polynomial distortion of arbitrary degree. We also produce examples of CAT(0) hyperbolic free-by-cyclic groups that contain closed hyperbolic surface subgroups that are exponentially distorted.     

Boundaries of cocompact proper CAT(0) spaces

A proper CAT(0) metric space X is cocompact if it has a compact generating domain with respect to its full isometry group. Any proper CAT(0) space, cocompact or not, has a compact metrizable boundary at infinity ∂_∞X; indeed, up to homeomorphism, this boundary is arbitrary. However, cocompactness imposes restrictions on what the boundary can be. Swenson showed that the boundary of a cocompact X has to be finite-dimensional. Here we show more: the dimension of ∂_∞X has to be equal to the global ?ech cohomological dimension of ∂_∞X. For example: a compact manifold with non-empty boundary cannot be ∂_∞X with X cocompact. We include two consequences of this topological/geometric fact: (1) The dimension of the boundary is a quasi-isometry invariant of CAT(0) groups. (2) Geodesic segments in a cocompact X can “almost” be extended to geodesic rays, i.e. X is almost geodesically complete.     

Generalizing the Croke-Kleiner construction

It is well known that every word hyperbolic group has a well-defined visual boundary. An example of C. Croke and B. Kleiner shows that the same cannot be said for CAT(0) groups. All boundaries of a CAT(0) group are, however, shape equivalent, as observed by M. Bestvina and R. Geoghegan. Bestvina has asked if they also satisfy the stronger condition of being cell-like equivalent. This article describes a construction which will produce CAT(0) groups with multiple boundaries. These groups have very complicated boundaries in high dimensions. It is our hope that their study may provide insight into Bestvina's question.     

Cat(0) Groups with Non-Locally Connected Boundary

The main theorem shows that whenever certain amalgamated productsact geometrically on a CAT(0) space, the space has non-locallyconnected boundary. One can now easily construct a wide varietyof examples of one-ended CAT(0) groups with non-locally connectedboundary. Applications of this theorem to right-angled Coxeterand Artin groups are considered. In particular, it is shownthat the natural CAT(0) space on which a right-angled Artingroup acts has locally connected boundary if and only if thegroup is Zⁿ for some n.     

Dimensions of ℝ-trees and self-similar fractal spaces of nonpositive curvature

We study various dimensions of spaces with nonpositive curvature in the A. D. Alexandrov sense, in particular, of ?-trees. We find some conditions necessary and sufficient for the metric space to be an ?-tree and clarify relations between the topological, Hausdorff, entropy, and rough dimensions. We build the examples of ?-trees and CAT(0)-spaces in which strict inequalities between the topological, Hausdorff, and entropy dimensions hold; we also show that the Hausdorff and entropy dimensions can be arbitrarily large while the topological dimension remains fixed.     

Some properties of non-positively curved lattices

We announce results on the structure of CAT(0) groups, CAT(0) lattices and of the underlying spaces. Our statements rely notably on a general study of the full isometry groups of proper CAT(0) spaces. Classical statements about Hadamard manifolds are established for singular spaces; new arithmeticity and rigidity statements are obtained. To cite this article: P.-E. Caprace, N. Monod, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 346 (2008).     

Coronae of product spaces and the coarse Baum–Connes conjecture

We study the coarse Baum–Connes conjecture for product spaces and product groups. We show that a product of CAT(0) groups, polycyclic groups and relatively hyperbolic groups which satisfy some assumptions on peripheral subgroups, satisfies the coarse Baum–Connes conjecture. For this purpose, we construct and analyze an appropriate compactification and its boundary, “corona”, of a product of proper metric spaces.     

Simultaneous metric uniformization of foliations by Riemann surfaces

We consider a two-dimensional linear foliation on torus of arbitrary dimension. For any smooth family of complex structures on the leaves we prove existence of smooth family of uniformizing (conformal complete flat) metrics on the leaves. We extend this result to linear foliations on and families of complex structures with bounded derivatives C ³-close to the standard complex structure. We prove that the analogous statement for arbitrary C two-dimensional foliation on compact manifold is wrong in general, even for suspensions over in dimension 3 the uniformizing metric can be nondifferentiable at some points; in dimension 4 the uniformizing metric of each noncompact leaf can be unbounded.     

Uniform convergence of sequences of solutions of two-dimensional linear elliptic equations with unbounded coefficients

This paper deals with the behavior of two-dimensional linear elliptic equations with unbounded (and possibly infinite) coefficients. We prove the uniform convergence of the solutions by truncating the coefficients and using a pointwise estimate of the solutions combined with a two-dimensional capacitary estimate. We give two applications of this result: the continuity of the solutions of two-dimensional linear elliptic equations by a constructive approach, and the density of the continuous functions in the domain of the Γ-limit of equicoercive diffusion energies in dimension two. We also build two counter-examples which show that the previous results cannot be extended to dimension three.     

Convex sets which are intersections of closed balls

In this paper we aim to investigate different questions concerning the stability of the set of all intersections of closed balls in a normed space. We are mainly concerned with: (i) the stability of under the closure of the vector sums; (ii) the stability under the addition of balls. We prove that (i) and (ii) are different properties which have strong connections with the geometry of the space. They have interest both in finite and infinite dimension. In the former case, there is a link with linear programming theory. We also study two more stability properties related to the well-known binary intersection property. Mazur sets and Mazur spaces are introduced, as a natural family satisfying (i). We prove that every two-dimensional normed space is a Mazur space, a result which distinguishes dimension d?2 from dimension d?3. We also discuss the connections between Mazur spaces and porosity.     

Homotopy of ends and boundaries of CAT(0) groups

For n ≥ 0, we exhibit CAT(0) groups that are n-connected at infinity, and have boundary which is (n − 1)-connected, but this boundary has non-trivial nth-homotopy group. In particular, we construct 1-ended CAT(0) groups that are simply connected at infinity, but have a boundary with non-trivial fundamental group. Our base examples are 1-ended CAT(0) groups that have non-path connected boundaries. In particular, we show all parabolic semidirect products of the free group of rank 2 and have a non-path connected boundary.     

Complex Surfaces with Cat(0) Metrics

We study complex surfaces with locally CAT(0) polyhedral K?hler metrics and construct such metrics on \mathbbCP²{\mathbb{C}P^{2}} with various orbifold structures. In particular, in relation to questions of Gromov and Davis–Moussong we construct such metrics on a compact quotient of the two-dimensional unit complex ball. In the course of the proof of these results we give criteria for Sasakian 3-manifolds to be globally CAT(1). We show further that for certain Kummer coverings of \mathbbCP²{\mathbb{C}P^{2}} of sufficiently high degree their desingularizations are of type K(π, 1).     

Geodesics in CAT(0) cubical complexes

We describe an algorithm to compute the geodesics in an arbitrary CAT(0) cubical complex. A key tool is a correspondence between cubical complexes of global non-positive curvature and posets with inconsistent pairs. This correspondence also gives an explicit realization of such a complex as the state complex of a reconfigurable system, and a way to embed any interval in the integer lattice cubing of its dimension.     

Flat rank of automorphism groups of buildings

The flat rank of a totally disconnected locally compact group G, denoted flat-rk(G), is an invariant of the topological group structure of G. It is defined thanks to a natural distance on the space of compact open subgroups of G. For a topological Kac-Moody group G with Weyl group W, we derive the inequalities alg-rk(W) ≤ flat-rk(G) ≤ rk(|W|₀). Here, alg-rk(W) is the maximal Z-rank of abelian subgroups of W, and rk(|W|₀) is the maximal dimension of isometrically embedded flats in the CAT0-realization |W|₀. We can prove these inequalities under weaker assumptions. We also show that for any integer n ≥ 1 there is a simple, compactly generated, locally compact, totally disconnected group G, with flat-rk(G) = n and which is not linear.     

Inductive Detection for Homotopy Equivalences of Manifolds

Let f:M N be a homotopy equivalence of CAT manifolds M and N (CAT := PL, TOP or DIFF) with finite fundamental groups. Each subgroup H 1(M) determines a homotopy equivalence fH:MH NH of the corresponding covering spaces. Suppose now that for each subgroup H in some particular class C (for example: elementary, hyperelementary or solvable) fH is homotopic to a CAT isomorphism. The general problem studied in this paper can be formulated as follows: If each map fH as above is homotopic to a CAT isomorphism, under what additional conditions on M, C and CAT is f itself (or f × idR) homotopic (properly homotopic) to a CATisomorphism?