Asymptotic conditions for smooth rigidity of negatively curved manifolds (Q429563)

The author establishes sufficient conditions for a continuous map of nonzero degree between a closed manifold and a negatively curved closed manifold to be homotopic to a smooth covering map, and in particular a diffeomorphism when the degree is one. When the domain manifold is negatively curved, the conditions can be stated in terms of the sphere maps formed by composition of the geodesic projections and the asymptotic boundary map induced by the original map on the universal covers.