Equidistant hypersurfaces of the bidisk (Q357851)

The bidisk is the product of two copies of the hyperbolic plane, \(H^2\times H^2\), endowed with the standard product metric. It is a basic example of a rank 2 symmetric space. The present paper is concerned with fundamental polyhedra for certain groups of isometries that act properly discontinuously on the bidisk. Let \(G\) be a finitely generated discrete group of isometries. Given a basepoint \(\mathbf z\in H^2\times H^2\), a fundamental domain for \(G\) can be obtained using the standard Dirichlet domain construction. For any \(\mathbf z, \mathbf w\in H^2\times H^2\), the equidistant hypersurface between \(\mathbf z\) and \(\mathbf w\), denoted by \(\mathbf{E(z,w)}\), is the set of all points \(\mathbf x\in H^2\times H^2\) whose distance from \(\mathbf z\) is equal to its distance from \(\mathbf w\). Hypersurfaces of this form bound Dirichlet domains in the bidisk. The main result of the article, Theorem 4.1, is as follows: Let \(g_1,g_2\in\mathrm{Isom}(H^2)\) be hyperbolic isometries of the hyperbolic plane. That is, for each \(i\), \(g_i\) fixes two points on the ideal boundary of \(H^2\). It follows that \(\gamma=(g_1,g_2)\) is an isometry of the bidisk. Consider the cyclic group \(\Gamma=\langle\gamma\rangle<\mathrm{Isom}(H^2\times H^2)\) generated by \(\gamma\). Choose a basepoint \(\mathbf z=(z_1,z_2)\), such that for each \(i\), \(z_i\) lies on the invariant axis for \(g_i\). Then the equidistant hypersurfaces \(\mathbf{E(z,\gamma(z))}\) and \(\mathbf{E}(\mathbf z,\gamma^{-1}(\mathbf z))\) are disjoint. In particular, the Dirichlet domain for \(\Gamma\), given such a basepoint, is two-faced. The authors go on to show that if the basepoint is chosen differently, the conclusion of Theorem 4.1 fails. That is, the Dirichlet domain need not to be two-faced. In contrast, for the hyperbolic plane, every Dirichlet domain for a cyclic Fuchsian group is two-faced. The authors conjecture that every group \(\Gamma\), constructed as above, admits a Dirichlet domain with more than two faces. The paper concludes with a discussion in support of the conjecture.