Polyhedral structure of maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces with finite boundary

TL;DR

This paper characterizes the structure of maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces with finite boundary, showing they are finite polyhedral complexes in infinity-norm space and exploring their deformation spaces.

Contribution

It explicitly describes maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces with finite boundary as finite polyhedral complexes and simplifies the proof of their injectivity property.

Findings

Maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces with finite boundary are isometric to polyhedral complexes in inity-norm space.

The boundary relations determine the combinatorics of the polyhedral complex.

The paper introduces a Teichmfcller space of deformations for these hyperbolic spaces.

Abstract

The boundary $\partial X$ of a boundary continuous Gromov hyperbolic space $X$ carries a natural Moebius structure on the boundary. For a proper, geodesically complete, boundary continuous Gromov hyperbolic space $X$, the boundary $\partial X$ equipped with its cross-ratio is a particular kind of quasi-metric space, called a quasi-metric antipodal space. Given a quasi-metric antipodal space $Z$, one may consider the family of all hyperbolic fillings of $Z$. In \cite{biswas2024quasi} it was shown that this family has a unique upper bound $\mathcal{M}(Z)$ (with respect to a natural partial order on hyperbolic fillings of $Z$), which can be described explicitly in terms of the cross-ratio on $Z$. As shown in \cite{biswas2024quasi}, the spaces $\mathcal{M}(Z)$ constitute a natural class of spaces called maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces. A natural problem is to describe explicitly the maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces $X$ whose boundary $\partial X$ is finite. We show that for a maximal Gromov hyperbolic space $X$ with boundary $\partial X$ of cardinality $n$, the space $X$ is isometric to a finite polyhedral complex embedded in $(\mathbb{R}^n, ||\cdot||_{\infty})$ with cells of dimension at most $n/2$, given by attaching $n$ half-lines to vertices of a compact polyhedral complex. In particular the geometry at infinity of $X$ is trivial. The combinatorics of the polyhedral complex is determined by certain relations $R \subset \partial X \times \partial X$ on the boundary $\partial X$, called antipodal relations. In \cite{biswas2024quasi} it was shown that maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces are injective metric spaces. We give a shorter, simpler proof of this fact in the case of spaces with finite boundary. We also consider the space of deformations of a maximal Gromov hyperbolic space with finite boundary, and define an associated Teichmuller space.