Automatic structures, rational growth, and geometrically finite hyperbolic groups (Q1895679)

This is the third paper in a series where the authors investigate sets of equivalence classes of synchronously or asynchronously automatic or biautomatic structures on a group. In this paper, they study the case of geometrically finite hyperbolic groups. (A ``hyperbolic group'' is here a group of isometries of the \(n\)-dimensional real hyperbolic space.) The authors defined (in their previous work) the set \({\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(G)\) of equivalence classes of synchronous automatic structures on \(G\). The main results in the present paper are the following. Let \(G\) be a geometrically finite hyperbolic group. For each element \([L]\in{\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(G)\), there is an induced element \([L_P]\in{\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(P)\) where \(P \subset G\) is a maximal parabolic subgroup. This induces a mapping \({\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(G)\to\prod_P{\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(P)\) where \(P\) ranges over the set of maximal parabolic subgroups of \(G\). The authors prove that this mapping is injective with dense image. They also compute the set \(B{\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(G)\) of equivalence classes of synchronous biautomatic structures on \(G\) by showing that the mapping \(B{\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(G)\to\prod_P B{\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(P)\) is a bijection, where \(P\) ranges here over the set of cusps, that is, a set of representatives for the conjugacy classes of maximal parabolic subgroups of \(G\). The sets \({\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(P)\) and \(B{\mathcal S}{\mathcal U}(P)\) were already computed by the authors in a previous paper. The authors prove also that any geometrically finite hyperbolic group \(G\) has a generating set \(A\) so that the geodesics in the free monoid on \(A\) form a regular language and the growth function is rational. They determine also which automatic structures on \(G\) are equivalent to automatic structures consisting of geodesics.