A rigidity property of some negatively curved solvable Lie groups

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Publication:1760052



Abstract: We show that for some negatively curved solvable Lie groups, all self quasiisometries are almost isometries. We prove this by showing that all self quasisymmetric maps of the ideal boundary (of the solvable Lie groups) are bilipschitz with respect to the visual metric. We also define parabolic visual metrics on the ideal boundary of Gromov hyperbolic spaces and relate them to visual metrics.


The paper under review proves quasi-isometric rigidity for a class of negatively curved, simply connected, solvable Lie groups, namely for semidirect products \(G_A:=\mathbb R^n\rtimes_{e^{tA}}\mathbb R\) with diagonal matrices \(A\in GL(n,{\mathbb R})\), whose eigenvalues \(\alpha_1,\ldots,\alpha_r\) are assumed to be positive and of multiplicities \(n_1,\ldots,n_r\) strictly smaller than \(n\). It is proved that every quasi-isometry of \(G_A\) is an almost-isometry, i.e., the multiplicative factor in the definition of quasi-isometry can be taken to be \(1\). (Remarkably this is not true for \(n_1=n\). Indeed, for \(A=\alpha \mathbb I\) one has \(G_A=\mathbb H^n\), where quasi-isometries need not be almost-isometries.) The approach to quasi-isometries is (as usual) to study the induced maps on the ideal boundary \(\partial G_A\), which are quasi-symmetries with respect to the visual Bourdon metric. All vertical geodesics \(t\rightarrow (x,t)\in \mathbb R^n\rtimes_{e^{tA}}\mathbb R\) tend to the same \(\xi_0\in\partial G_A\) and the complement \(\partial G_A\setminus\left\{\xi_0\right\}\) can be identified with \(\mathbb R^n=\mathbb R^{n_1}\times\ldots\times\mathbb R^{n_r}\). The authors consider the parabolic visual metric \(D(x,y):=\max\left\{\mid x_1-y_1\mid,\mid x_2-y_2\mid^{\frac{\alpha_1}{\alpha_2}},\ldots,\mid x_r-y_r\mid^{\frac{\alpha_1}{\alpha_r}}\right\}\) on \(\partial G_A\setminus\left\{\xi_0\right\}=\mathbb R^n\), it is bilipschitz equivalent to the Hamenstädt metric. They reprove a result of Kleiner and Tyson that any quasi-symmetry of \((\mathbb R^n,D)\) preserves the horizontal foliation by the \(\mathbb R^{n_1}\times\left\{*\right\}\). The main technical result of the paper is then that every quasi-symmetry of \(\partial G_A\) preserves \(\xi_0\) and is bilipschitz on \((\partial G_A\setminus\left\{\xi_0\right\},D)\), i.e., for the parabolic visual metric. An immediate corollary is a result of Kleiner that \(G_A\) is not quasi-isometric to any finitely generated group. Indeed such a group would be Gromov hyperbolic and have a global fixed point for its induced action on its ideal boundary, easily yielding a contradiction. The quasi-isometric rigidity follows from the main technical result together with a (more generally proven) lemma which in particular implies that (under certain assumptions) a quasi-isometry of CAT(-1)-spaces is an almost-isometry if and only if the boundary map is bilipschitz with respect to the Hamenstädt metrics.











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