Generic coarse geometry of leaves (Q1649893): Difference between revisions

Let \((X,\mathscr{F})\) be a compact Polish foliated space. Any choice of a regular foliated atlas determines a metric on each leaf and these metrics are canonical up to equi-coarse quasi-isometry. That is, the metrics on each leaf constructed from two different choices of atlases are coarsely quasi-isometric to each other and the distortion constants of the quasi-isometries can be chosen to be the same for all leaves. The objective of this book is to study coarse geometric properties of generic leaves, where in most theorems ``generic'' is used in the topological sense that the statements hold for a set of leaves whose union is residual, that is, it contains a countable intersection of open dense subsets of \(X\). A key prerequesite for having suitable residual sets of generic leaves is to assume that the foliated space is transitive (at least one leave is dense) or even minimal (all leaves are dense). The residual sets appearing in the theorems are usually the union \(X_0\) of all leaves without holonomy or the union \(X_{0,d}\) of all leaves that are dense and have no holonomy. In addition, the authors also give a few theorems where the word ``generic'' is used in a measure theoretic sense. The coarse geometric invariants which are investigated for generic leaves are quasi-isometry type, number of ends, growth type, amenability, the Higson corona, asymptotic dimension and limit sets. It turns out that usually a dichotomy holds: either one value of such a coarse geometric invariant is shared by residually many leaves or else each possible value is shared by only meagerly many leaves, that is, the complement of this set of leaves is residual. A typical example of what types of results are presented in this book is Theorem 1.2: Theorem 1.2. Let \((X,\mathscr{F})\) be a transitive compact Polish foliated space. Then the following dichotomy holds: \newline (i) Either all leaves in \(X_{0,d}\) are equi-coarsely quasi-isometric to each other; or else \newline (ii) every leaf in \(X\) is coarsely quasi-isometric to meagerly many leaves; in particular, in this case, there are uncountably many coarse quasi-isometry types of leaves in \(X_{0,d}\). The book begins with an introduction containing all the main theorems. Afterwards, the book is split into two parts. Part I is a fairly extensive introduction to coarse geometry of metric spaces. It is worthwhile mentioning that some conventions made in this part of the book, in particular the way in which the notion of ``quasi-isometry'' is defined, are quite different from those of John Roe's standard reference on coarse geometry [\textit{J. Roe}, Lectures on coarse geometry. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2003; Zbl 1042.53027)]. However, these differences are only relevant if one wants to track down the exact distortion constants, but they do not affect the general comprehensibility in any way. Part II of the book first recalls the definition of pseudogroups and then develops versions of the main theorems for generic orbits of pseudogroups. Consecutively the main theorems are proven by applying the pseudogroup versions of the theorems to the holonomy pseudogroup on a complete transversal. The final chapter gives an extensive list of examples illustrating the phenomena described in the main theorems and states some open problems.