No Arabic abstract
We give several sufficient conditions for uniform exponential growth in the setting of virtually torsion-free hierarchically hyperbolic groups. For example, any hierarchically hyperbolic group that is also acylindrically hyperbolic has uniform exponential growth. In addition, we provide a quasi-isometric characterizations of hierarchically hyperbolic groups without uniform exponential growth. To achieve this, we gain new insights on the structure of certain classes of hierarchically hyperbolic groups. Our methods give a new unified proof of uniform exponential growth for several examples of groups with notions of non-positive curvature. In particular, we obtain the first proof of uniform exponential growth for certain groups that act geometrically on CAT(0) cubical groups of dimension 3 or more. Under additional hypotheses, we show that a quantitative Tits alternative holds for hierarchically hyperbolic groups.
We introduce a quantitative characterization of subgroup alternatives modeled on the Tits alternative in terms of group laws and investigate when this property is preserved under extensions. We develop a framework that lets us expand the classes of groups known to have locally uniform exponential growth to include extensions of either word hyperbolic or right-angled Artin groups by groups with locally uniform exponential growth. From this, we deduce that the automorphism group of a torsion-free one-ended hyperbolic group has locally uniform exponential growth. Our methods also demonstrate that automorphism groups of torsion-free one-ended toral relatively hyperbolic groups and certain right-angled Artin groups satisfy our quantitative subgroup alternative.
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.
We study uniform exponential growth of groups acting on CAT(0) cube complexes. We show that groups acting without global fixed points on CAT(0) square complexes either have uniform exponential growth or stabilize a Euclidean subcomplex. This generalizes the work of Kar and Sageev considers free actions. Our result lets us show uniform exponential growth for certain groups that act improperly on CAT(0) square complexes, namely, finitely generated subgroups of the Higman group and triangle-free Artin groups. We also obtain that non-virtually abelian groups acting freely on CAT(0) cube complexes of any dimension with isolated flats that admit a geometric group action have uniform exponential growth.
We examine residual properties of word-hyperbolic groups, adapting a method introduced by Darren Long to study the residual properties of Kleinian groups.
We prove that the outer automorphism group $Out(G)$ is residually finite when the group $G$ is virtually compact special (in the sense of Haglund and Wise) or when $G$ is isomorphic to the fundamental group of some compact $3$-manifold. To prove these results we characterize commensurating endomorphisms of acylindrically hyperbolic groups. An endomorphism $phi$ of a group $G$ is said to be commensurating, if for every $g in G$ some non-zero power of $phi(g)$ is conjugate to a non-zero power of $g$. Given an acylindrically hyperbolic group $G$, we show that any commensurating endomorphism of $G$ is inner modulo a small perturbation. This generalizes a theorem of Minasyan and Osin, which provided a similar statement in the case when $G$ is relatively hyperbolic. We then use this result to study pointwise inner and normal endomorphisms of acylindrically hyperbolic groups.