Structural stability of meandering-hyperbolic group actions

Abstract

In his 1985 paper Sullivan sketched a proof of his structural stability theorem for differentiable group actions satisfying certain expansion-hyperbolicity axioms. In this paper we relax Sullivan's axioms and introduce a notion of "meandering hyperbolicity" for group actions on geodesic metric spaces. This generalization is substantial enough to encompass actions of certain non-hyperbolic groups, such as actions of "uniform lattices" in semisimple Lie groups on flag manifolds. At the same time, our notion is sufficiently robust and we prove that meandering-hyperbolic actions are still structurally stable. We also prove some basic results on meandering-hyperbolic actions and give other examples of such actions.