Stability of the volume growth rate under quasi-isometries (Q2303548)

Quasi-isometries only preserve large-scale properties of metric spaces. When they are restricted on spaces with controlled local geometry, many other properties can be proved to be stable. In [J. Math. Soc. Japan 37, 391--413 (1985; Zbl 0554.53030)] and [J. Math. Soc. Japan 38, 227--238 (1986; Zbl 0577.53031)], \textit{M. Kanai} proved that under the hypothesis that the injectivity radius and the Ricci curvature are bounded from below, the volume growth rate of balls in Riemannian manifolds is preserved by quasi-isometries. In the restricted context of Riemann surfaces, many surfaces endowed with the constant curvature metric fail to satisfy the hypothesis of Kanai's theorem. In particular, the existence of cusps contradicts the minoration of the injectivity radius. This paper extends the result on stability of the volume growth rate by quasi-isometries to a class of spaces with a different hypothesis on the local geometry. The focus is on Riemannian manifolds of dimension two with a geodesic boundary (if any) and pinched negative curvature. The main result is that for any such surface $X$ with exponential growth, any Riemannian manifold $Y$ with geodesic boundary and Ricci curvature bounded from below, which is quasi-isometric to $X$, also has exponential growth. When $X$ has polynomial growth, $Y$ also has polynomial growth and an optimal estimation of the growth order of $Y$ is given. Among the technical lemmas involved in the proof of the main theorem, a key result, which is interesting by itself, is that Riemannian surfaces with pinched negative curvature are bilipschitz equivalent to geodesically bordered surfaces with constant negative curvature.