Higher order Dehn functions for horospheres in products of Hadamard spaces
Abstract Let X be a product of r locally compact and geodesically complete Hadamard spaces. We prove that the horospheres in X centered at regular boundary points of X are Lipschitz-(r − 2)-connected. If X has finite Assouad–Nagata dimension, then using the filling construction by R. Young in [10] this gives sharp bounds on higher order Dehn functions for such horospheres. Moreover, if Γ ⊂ Is(X) is a lattice acting cocompactly on X minus a union of disjoint horoballs, then we get a sharp bound on higher order Dehn functions for Γ. We deduce that apart from the Hilbert modular groups already considered by R. Young, every irreducible ℚ-rank one lattice acting on a product of r Riemannian symmetric spaces of the noncompact type is undistorted up to dimension r−1 and has k-th order Dehn function asymptotic to V(k+1)/k for all k ≤ r − 2.