Construction of pseudo-isometries for treelike hyperbolic 3-manifolds of infinite volume. (Q1415527)

A version of Mostow's rigidity theorem implies that every pseudo-isometry between complete hyperbolic 3-manifolds of finite volume is homotopic to an isometry. This kind of rigidity fails for the simplest examples of infinite volume manifolds. The present paper proves rigidity for an interesting class of infinite volume manifolds, possibly with infinitely many ends. A {treelike manifold} is one which admits a geodesic triangulation whose lengths are bounded above and below and a decomposition by incompressible triangulated surfaces into acylindrical submanifolds. The main result is that every homotopy equivalence between two such complete hyperbolic 3-manifolds is induced by an isometry. A general construction for treelike manifolds is given, using Thurston's hyperbolization of acylindrical manifolds. The construction yields a triangulated manifold generated by a graph grammar. The proof uses Thurston's compactness theorem for deformations of acylindrical manifolds, Sullivan's conservativity of actions on limit sets, and McMullen's criterion for conservativity by uniform boundedness of the injectivity radius of the quotient. The main technique of proof is to construct a Lipschitz map between the quotient manifolds.