The ending lamination conjecture for hyperbolic three-manifolds with slender end-invariants (Q2373549)

One of the fundamental problems in the study of hyperbolic \(3\)-manifolds is to provide conditions that determine the manifold uniquely. Thurston's ending lamination conjecture, which has now been proved by \textit{Jeffrey Brock}, \textit{Richard D. Canary} and \textit{Yair Minsky} [Classification of Kleinian surface groups, II: The ending lamination conjecture, preprint (2004)], says that a geometrically tame hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold is uniquely determined by its topological type and a collection of end-invariants. An end-invariant is either a conformal structure or a measured lamination on a surface. The first main theorem of the paper under review is a uniqueness result for singly degenerate hyperbolic \(3\)-manifolds. Precisely, if two singly degenerate hyperbolic \(3\)-manifolds without cusps have the same conformal boundary end-invariant and the same sequence of geodesic pair-of-pants multicurves with length going to zero, then they are isometric. Here, a geodesic pair-of-pants multicurve is a collection of geodesics whose representatives give a pair-of-pants decomposition on some component of the boundary of a relative compact core minus the parabolic locus. Its length is defined to be the sum of the lengths of the closed geodesic components. It is announced in the paper that the technical restriction to singly degenerate manifolds will be removed in future work. Second, by using the results of \textit{Yair N. Minsky} [Geom. Topol. 4, 117--148 (2000; Zbl 0953.30027) and Invent. Math. 146, No. 1, 143--192 (2001; Zbl 1061.37026)], the ending lamination conjecture is proved for singly degenerate hyperbolic \(3\)-manifolds without cusps with slender ending lamination end-invariants. An ending lamination is slender if there exists a sequence of collections of annuli whose core curves give pair-of-pants decompositions of the boundary component of a compact core of the manifold for each \(n\) such that its diameter (defined in the paper) goes to infinity. This result is known by \textit{J. Brock, R. D. Canary} and \textit{Y. Minsky} [loc. cit.], but the argument here avoids the construction of a model manifold together with a bilipschitz map from the model to the hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold given the topological type and the end-invariants. By a slight modification of an example by Minsky, a construction of singly degenerate hyperbolic \(3\)-manifolds without cusps but with slender ending lamination end-invariants is also given.