Sectional curvature of polygonal complexes with planar substructures (Q502668)

In this important paper, the authors introduce a class of polygonal complexes and consider for them a notion of sectional combinatorial curvature. These complexes can be viewed as generalizations of 2-dimensional Euclidean and hyperbolic buildings. They focus on the case of non-positive and negative combinatorial curvature. As geometric results they obtain a Hadamard-Cartan type theorem, thinness of bigons, Gromov hyperbolicity and estimates for the Cheeger constant. They employ the latter to get spectral estimates, show discreteness of the spectrum in the sense of a Donnelly-Li type theorem and present corresponding eigenvalue asymptotics. Moreover, they prove a unique continuation theorem for eigenfunctions and the solvability of the Dirichlet problem at infinity.