Ideal boundaries of pseudo-Anosov flows and uniform convergence groups with connections and applications to large scale geometry (Q422815)

Given a general pseudo-Anosov flow in a closed 3-manifold, the orbit space of the lifted flow to the universal cover is homeomorphic to an open disk. The author constructs a natural compactification of this orbit space with an ideal circle boundary. If there are no perfect fits between stable and unstable leaves and the flow is not topologically conjugate to a suspension Anosov flow, then he shows that the ideal circle of the orbit space has a natural quotient space which is a sphere. This sphere is a dynamical systems ideal boundary for a compactification of the universal cover of the manifold. The main result of this paper is that the fundamental group acts on the flow ideal boundary as a uniform convergence group. The author concludes that the fundamental group of the manifold is Gromov-hyperbolic and so the action of the fundamental group on the flow ideal boundary is conjugate to the action on the Gromov ideal boundary. These results give a new proof that the fundamental group of a closed, atoroidal 3-manifold which fibers over the circle is Gromov-hyperbolic. The main result also implies that pseudo-Anosov flows without perfect fits are quasigeodesic flows and that the stable and unstable foliations of these flows are quasi-isometric foliations. If a foliation is \({\mathbb R}\)-covered or with one-sided branching in an aspherical, atoroidal 3-manifold, then the results above imply that the leaves of the foliation in the universal cover extend continuously to the sphere at infinity.