English

Boundary rigidity of 3D CAT(0) cube complexes

Combinatorics 2023-09-11 v1 Geometric Topology

Abstract

The boundary rigidity problem is a classical question from Riemannian geometry: if (M,g)(M, g) is a Riemannian manifold with smooth boundary, is the geometry of MM determined up to isometry by the metric dgd_g induced on the boundary M\partial M? In this paper, we consider a discrete version of this problem: can we determine the combinatorial type of a finite cube complex from its boundary distances? As in the continuous case, reconstruction is not possible in general, but one expects a positive answer under suitable contractibility and non-positive curvature conditions. Indeed, in two dimensions Haslegrave gave a positive answer to this question when the complex is a finite quadrangulation of the disc with no internal vertices of degree less than 44. We prove a 33-dimensional generalisation of this result: the combinatorial type of a finite CAT(0) cube complex with an embedding in R3\mathbb{R}^3 can be reconstructed from its boundary distances. Additionally, we prove a direct strengthening of Haslegrave's result: the combinatorial type of any finite 2-dimensional CAT(0) cube complex can be reconstructed from its boundary distances.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.04385,
  title  = {Boundary rigidity of 3D CAT(0) cube complexes},
  author = {John Haslegrave and Alex Scott and Youri Tamitegama and Jane Tan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.04385},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

30 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:16:23.220Z