The fundamental group of a visual boundary versus the fundamental group at infinity (Q1868877)

A proper geodesic space \(X\) is said to be non-positively curved if any two points on the sides of a geodesic triangle in \(X\) are no further apart than their corresponding points on a reference triangle in Euclidean 2-space. The (visual) boundary of a non-positively curved geodesic space \(X\) is defined to be the set of all geodesic rays emanating from a fixed base point endowed with the compact-open topology. For a non-positively curved geodesic space \(X\) with base point \(x_0\) and a geodesic ray \(\omega\) emanating from \(x_0\), there is a natural homomorphism from the fundamental group of the boundary of \(X\) based at \(\omega\) to the fundamental group at infinity of \(X\) based at \(\omega\). The authors show that if the boundary admits a universal covering space, then the natural homomorphism is an isomorphism. They also establish that if the boundary is one-dimensional, then the homomorphism is injective. The proofs are based on elementary techniques of shape theory.