arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Jacob Russell.
A negatively curved hyperbolic cone metric on a surface is rigid if it is determined by the support of its Liouville current. We use a theorem of Erlandsson, Leininger, and Sadanand to show that there are nine mapping class group orbits of equivalence classes of non-rigid (aka flexible) metrics in the case of the genus 2 surface.
We show that for any surface of genus at least 3 equipped with any choice of framing, the graph of non-separating curves with winding number 0 with respect to the framing is hierarchically hyperbolic but not Gromov hyperbolic. We also describe how to build analogues of the curve graph for marked strata of abelian differentials that capture the combinatorics of their boundaries, analogous to how the curve graph captures the combinatorics of the augmented Teichmueller space. These curve graph analogues are also shown to be hierarchically, but not Gromov, hyperbolic.
We show that quasi-isometries of (well-behaved) hierarchically hyperbolic groups descend to quasi-isometries of their maximal hyperbolic space. This has two applications, one relating to quasi-isometry invariance of acylindrical hyperbolicity, and the other a linear progress result for Markov chains. The appendix, by Jacob Russell, contains a partial converse under the (necessary) condition that the maximal hyperbolic space is one-ended.
We study the boundaries of relatively hyperbolic HHGs. Using the simplicial structure on the hierarchically hyperbolic boundary, we characterize both relative hyperbolicity and being thick of order 1 among HHGs. In the case of relatively hyperbolic HHGs, we show that the Bowditch boundary of the group is the quotient of the HHS boundary obtained by collapsing the limit sets of the peripheral subgroups to a point. In establishing this, we give a construction that allows one to modify an HHG structure by including a collection of hyperbolically embedded subgroups into the HHG structure.
We prove several topological and dynamical properties of the boundary of a hierarchically hyperbolic group are independent of the specific hierarchically hyperbolic structure. This is accomplished by proving that the boundary is invariant under a "maximization" procedure introduced by the first two authors and Durham.
Behrstock, Hagen, and Sisto classified 3-manifold groups admitting a hierarchically hyperbolic space structure. However, these structures were not always equivariant with respect to the group. In this paper, we classify 3-manifold groups admitting equivariant hierarchically hyperbolic structures. The key component of our proof is that the admissible groups introduced by Croke and Kleiner always admit equivariant hierarchically hyperbolic structures. For non-geometric graph manifolds, this is contrary to a conjecture of Behrstock, Hagen, and Sisto and also contrasts with results about CAT(0) cubical structures on these groups. Perhaps surprisingly, our arguments involve the construction of suitable quasimorphisms on the Seifert pieces, in order to construct actions on quasi-lines.
We show that finitely generated and purely pseudo-Anosov subgroups of fibered 3-manifolds with reducible monodromy are convex cocompact as subgroups of the mapping class group via the Birman exact sequence. Combined with results of Dowdall--Kent--Leininger and Kent--Leininger--Schleimer, this establishes the result for the image of all such fibered 3-manifold groups in the mapping class group.
For a closed and orientable surface of genus at least 2, we prove the surface group extensions of the stabilizers of multicurves are hierarchically hyperbolic groups. This answers a question of Durham, Dowdall, Leininger, and Sisto. We also include an appendix that employs work of Charney, Cordes, and Sisto to characterize the Morse boundaries of hierarchically hyperbolic groups whose largest acylindrical action on a hyperbolic space is on a quasi-tree.
We prove that any graph of multicurves satisfying certain natural properties is either hyperbolic, relatively hyperbolic, or thick. Further, this geometric characterization is determined by the set of subsurfaces that intersect every vertex of the graph. This extends previously established results for the pants graph and the separating curve graph to a broad family of graphs associated to surfaces.
We prove that Morse local-to-global groups grow exponentially faster than their infinite index stable subgroups. This generalizes a result of Dahmani, Futer, and Wise in the context of quasi-convex subgroups of hyperbolic groups to a broad class of groups that contains the mapping class group, CAT(0) groups, and the fundamental groups of closed 3-manifolds. To accomplish this, we develop a theory of automatic structures on Morse geodesics in Morse local-to-global groups. Other applications of these automatic structures include a description of stable subgroups in terms of regular languages, rationality of the growth of stable subgroups, density in the Morse boundary of the attracting fixed points of Morse elements, and containment of the Morse boundary inside the limit set of any infinite normal subgroup.
We show that any graph product of finitely generated groups is hierarchically hyperbolic relative to its vertex groups. We apply this result to answer two questions of Behrstock, Hagen, and Sisto: we show that the syllable metric on any graph product forms a hierarchically hyperbolic space, and that graph products of hierarchically hyperbolic groups are themselves hierarchically hyperbolic groups. This last result is a strengthening of a result of Berlai and Robbio by removing the need for extra hypotheses on the vertex groups. We also answer two questions of Genevois about the geometry of the electrification of a graph product of finite groups.
We prove that the separating curve graph of a connected, compact, orientable surface with genus at least 3 and a single boundary component is not relatively hyperbolic. This completes the classification of when the separating curve graph is hyperbolic and relatively hyperbolic initiated by previous works of the authors.
We show the mapping class group, CAT(0) groups, the fundamental groups of closed 3-manifolds, and certain relatively hyperbolic groups have a local-to-global property for Morse quasi-geodesics. This allows us to generalize combination theorems of Gitik for quasiconvex subgroups of hyperbolic groups to the stable subgroups of these groups. In the case of the mapping class group, this gives combination theorems for convex cocompact subgroups. We show a number of additional consequences of this local-to-global property, including a Cartan-Hadamard type theorem for detecting hyperbolicity locally and discreteness of translation length of conjugacy classes of Morse elements with a fixed gauge. To prove the relatively hyperbolic case, we develop a theory of deep points for local quasi-geodesics in relatively hyperbolic spaces, extending work of Hruska.
We provide a simple, combinatorial criteria for a hierarchically hyperbolic space to be relatively hyperbolic by proving a new formulation of relative hyperbolicity in terms of hierarchy structures. In the case of clean hierarchically hyperbolic groups, this criteria characterizes relative hyperbolicity. We apply our criteria to graphs associated to surfaces and prove that the separating curve graph of a surface is relatively hyperbolic when the surface has zero or two punctures. We also recover a celebrated theorem of Brock and Masur on the relative hyperbolicity of the Weil-Petersson metric on Teichmuller space for surfaces with complexity three.
Hierarchically hyperbolic spaces (HHSs) are a large class of spaces that provide a unified framework for studying the mapping class group, right-angled Artin and Coxeter groups, and many 3--manifold groups. We investigate strongly quasiconvex subsets in this class and characterize them in terms of their contracting properties, relative divergence, the coarse median structure, and the hierarchical structure itself. Along the way, we obtain new tools to study HHSs, including two new equivalent definitions of hierarchical quasiconvexity and a version of the bounded geodesic image property for strongly quasconvex subsets. Utilizing our characterization, we prove that the hyperbolically embedded subgroups of hierarchically hyperbolic groups are precisely those which are almost malnormal and strongly quasiconvex, producing a new result in the case of the mapping class group. We also apply our characterization to study strongly quasiconvex subsets in several specific examples of HHSs. We show that while many commonly studied HHSs have the property that that every strongly quasiconvex subset is either hyperbolic or coarsely covers the entire space, right-angled Coxeter groups exhibit a wide variety of strongly quasiconvex subsets.
We generalize a result of Paulin on the Gromov boundary of hyperbolic groups to the Morse boundary of proper, maximal hierarchically hyperbolic spaces admitting cocompact group actions by isometries. Namely we show that if the Morse boundaries of two such spaces each contain at least three points, then the spaces are quasi-isometric if and only if there exists a 2-stable, quasi-m\"obius homeomorphism between their Morse boundaries. Our result extends a recent result of Charney-Murray, who prove such a classification for CAT(0) groups, and is new for mapping class groups and the fundamental groups of $3$-manifolds without Nil or Sol components.
We consider two manifestations of non-positive curvature: acylindrical actions on hyperbolic spaces and quasigeodesic stability. We study these properties for the class of hierarchically hyperbolic groups, which is a general framework for studying many important families of groups, including mapping class groups, right-angled Coxeter and Artin groups, most 3-manifold groups, and many others. A group that admits an acylindrical action on a hyperbolic space may admit many such actions on different hyperbolic spaces, so it is natural to search for a "best" one. The set of all cobounded acylindrical actions on hyperbolic spaces admits a natural poset structure; in this paper we prove that all hierarchically hyperbolic groups admit a unique action which is the largest in this poset. The action we construct is also universal in the sense that every element which acts loxodromically in some acylindrical action on a hyperbolic space does so in this one. Special cases of this result are themselves new and interesting. For instance, this is the first proof that right-angled Coxeter groups admit universal acylindrical actions. The notion of quasigeodesic stability of subgroups provides a natural analogue of quasiconvexity outside the context of hyperbolic groups. We provide a complete classification of stable subgroups of hierarchically hyperbolic groups, generalizing and extending results that are known for mapping class groups and right-angled Artin groups. We also provide a characterization of contracting quasigeodesics; interestingly, in this generality the proof is much simpler than in the special cases where it was already known. In the appendix, it is verified that any space satisfying the a priori weaker property of being an "almost hierarchically hyperbolic space" is actually a hierarchically hyperbolic space. The results of the appendix are used to streamline the proofs in the main text.