Injective metrizability and the duality theory of cubings

Following his discovery that finite metric spaces have injective envelopes naturally admitting a polyhedral structure, Isbell, in his pioneering work on injective metric spaces, attempted a characterization of cellular complexes admitting the structure of an injective metric space. A bit later, Mai and Tang confirmed Isbell’s conjecture that a simplicial complex is injectively metrizable if and only if it is collapsible. Considerable advances in the understanding, classification and applications of injective envelopes have since been made by Dress, Huber, Sturmfels and collaborators, and most recently by Lang. Unfortunately a combination theory for injective polyhedra is still unavailable.Here we expose a connection to the duality theory of cubings –simply connected non-positively curved cubical complexes –which provides a more principled and accessible approach to Mai and Tang’s result, providing one with a powerful tool for systematic construction of locally-compact injective metric spaces:Main Theorem. Any complete pointed Gromov–Hausdorff limit of locally-finite piecewise-${?}_{\infty }$ cubings is injective. □This result may be construed as a combination theorem for the simplest injective polytopes, ${?}_{\infty }$-parallelopipeds, where the condition for retaining injectivity is the combinatorial non-positive curvature condition on the complex. Thus it represents a first step towards a more comprehensive combination theory for injective spaces.In addition to setting the earlier work on injectively metrizable complexes within its proper context of non-positively curved geometry, this paper is meant to provide the reader with a systematic review of the results – otherwise scattered throughout the geometric group theory literature – on the duality theory and the geometry of cubings, which make this connection possible.