Injectivity radius and fundamental groups of hyperbolic 3-manifolds (Q1866517)

In this paper the author establishes a relation between a metric invariant of a hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold -- namely its injectivity radius -- and a topological one -- the rank of its fundamental group. The author proves that the injectivity radius of a closed hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold (which can be thought of as one half the minimum length of all essential loops) is bounded above by a universal constant which depends only on the rank of its fundamental group. Notice that no lower bound exists, since, by performing hyperbolic Dehn-fillings, one can arbitrarily reduce the injectivity radius without changing the rank. The main tool in the proof is the existence of a ``carrier \(n\)-graph'' for a closed hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold \(M\), i.e. a map from a trivalent connected graph into \(M\), which induces an epimorphism of fundamental groups. It turns out that carrier \(n\)-graphs can be chosen to enjoy nice properties. The author analyses the lifts to the universal cover of \(M\) of the loops in the graph, whose image in \(M\) is null-homotopic. The analysis relies basically on the fact that \(\mathbb{H}^3\) (the universal cover of \(M\)) is Gromov-hyperbolic. By assuming that no upper bound exists, one can find a carrier graph whose fundamental group injects into \(\pi_1(M)\), thus obtaining a contradiction. In the special case when the rank is \(2\), the author provides a direct geometric argument (previously known to C. Adams) to prove the result. In this case, a numeric value for the upper bound is also given. As a corollary, the author remarks that any closed hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold admits finitely sheeted covers of arbitrarily large rank.