The local-to-global property for Morse quasi-geodesics

We show the mapping class group, $${{\,\mathrm{CAT}\,}}(0)$$ CAT ( 0 ) groups, the fundamental groups of closed 3-manifolds, and certain relatively hyperbolic groups have a local-to-global property for Morse quasi-geodesics. This allows us to generalize combination theorems of Gitik for quasiconvex subgroups of hyperbolic groups to the stable subgroups of these groups. In the case of the mapping class group, this gives combination theorems for convex cocompact subgroups. We show a number of additional consequences of this local-to-global property, including a Cartan–Hadamard type theorem for detecting hyperbolicity locally and discreteness of translation length of conjugacy classes of Morse elements with a fixed gauge. To prove the relatively hyperbolic case, we develop a theory of deep points for local quasi-geodesics in relatively hyperbolic spaces, extending work of Hruska.

Towers and elementary embeddings in toral relatively hyperbolic groups

In a remarkable series of papers, Zlil Sela classified the first-order theories of free groups and torsion-free hyperbolic groups using geometric structures he called towers. It was later proved by Chloé Perin that if [Formula: see text] is an elementarily embedded subgroup (or elementary submodel) of a torsion-free hyperbolic group [Formula: see text], then [Formula: see text] is a tower over [Formula: see text]. We prove a generalization of Perin’s result to toral relatively hyperbolic groups using JSJ and shortening techniques.

Local limit theorems in relatively hyperbolic groups I: rough estimates

This is the first of a series of two papers dealing with local limit theorems in relatively hyperbolic groups. In this first paper, we prove rough estimates for the Green function. Along the way, we introduce the notion of relative automaticity which will be useful in both papers and we show that relatively hyperbolic groups are relatively automatic. We also define the notion of spectral positive recurrence for random walks on relatively hyperbolic groups. We then use our estimates for the Green function to prove that $p_n\asymp R^{-n}n^{-3/2}$ for spectrally positive-recurrent random walks, where $p_n$ is the probability of going back to the origin at time n and where R is the inverse of the spectral radius of the random walk.