English

Cross ratios on ${\rm CAT(0)}$ cube complexes and marked length-spectrum rigidity

Geometric Topology 2022-01-28 v4 Differential Geometry Group Theory

Abstract

We show that group actions on irreducible CAT(0){\rm CAT(0)} cube complexes with no free faces are uniquely determined by their 1\ell^1 length function. Actions are allowed to be non-proper and non-cocompact, as long as they are minimal and have no finite orbit in the visual boundary. This is, to our knowledge, the first length-spectrum rigidity result in a setting of non-positive curvature (with the exception of some particular cases in dimension 2 and symmetric spaces). As our main tool, we develop a notion of cross ratio on Roller boundaries of CAT(0){\rm CAT(0)} cube complexes. Inspired by results in negative curvature, we give a general framework reducing length-spectrum rigidity questions to the problem of extending cross-ratio preserving maps between (subsets of) Roller boundaries. The core of our work is then to show that, when there are no free faces, these cross-ratio preserving maps always extend to cubical isomorphisms. All our results equally apply to cube complexes with variable edge lengths. As a special case of our work, we construct a compactification of the Charney-Stambaugh-Vogtmann Outer Space for the group of untwisted outer automorphisms of an (irreducible) right-angled Artin group. This generalises the length function compactification of the classical Culler-Vogtmann Outer Space.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.02447,
  title  = {Cross ratios on ${\rm CAT(0)}$ cube complexes and marked length-spectrum rigidity},
  author = {Jonas Beyrer and Elia Fioravanti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.02447},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

51 pages, 1 figure; minor changes to the exposition, to appear on J. Lond. Math. Soc

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:00:00.663Z