Trees, dendrites, and the Cannon-Thurston map

Seminar: 
Geometry & Topology
Event time: 
Tuesday, February 11, 2020 - 4:15pm
Location: 
DL 431
Speaker: 
Elizabeth Field
Speaker affiliation: 
UIUC
Event description: 

When $1\to H\to G\to Q\to 1$ is a short exact sequence of three word-hyperbolic groups, Mahan Mitra (Mj) has shown that the inclusion map from $H$ to $G$ extends continuously to a map between the Gromov boundaries of $H$ and $G$. This boundary map is known as the Cannon-Thurston map. In this context, Mitra associates to every point $z$ in the Gromov boundary of $Q$ an ``ending lamination'' on $H$ which consists of pairs of distinct points in the boundary of $H$. We prove that for each such $z$, the quotient of the Gromov boundary of $H$ by the equivalence relation generated by this ending lamination is a dendrite, that is, a tree-like topological space. This result generalizes the work of Kapovich-Lustig and Dowdall-Kapovich-Taylor, who prove that in the case where $H$ is a free group and $Q$ is a convex cocompact purely atoroidal subgroup of $\mathrm{Out}(F_N)$, one can identify the resultant quotient space with a certain $\mathbb{R}$-tree in the boundary of Culler-Vogtmann's Outer space.