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We study properties of generic elements of groups of isometries of hyperbolic spaces. Under general combinatorial conditions, we prove that loxodromic elements are generic (i.e., they have full density with respect to counting in balls for the word metric in the Cayley graph) and translation length grows linearly. We provide applications to a large class of relatively hyperbolic groups and graph products, including all right-angled Artin groups and right-angled Coxeter groups.

We prove a generalization of the fundamental inequality of Guivarc'h relating entropy, drift and critical exponent to Gibbs measures on geometrically finite quotients of CAT(-1) metric spaces. For random walks with finite superexponential moment, we show that the equality is achieved if and only if the Gibbs density is equivalent to the hitting measure. As a corollary, if the action is not convex cocompact, any hitting measure is singular to any Gibbs density., Comment: 29 pages

We show that a random 3-manifold with positive first Betti number admits a tower of cyclic covers with exponential torsion growth., Comment: 32 pages, no figures

Given a probability measure on a finitely generated group, its Martin boundary is a way to compactify the group using the Green's function of the corresponding random walk. We give a complete topological characterization of the Martin boundary of finitely supported random walks on relatively hyperbolic groups with virtually abelian parabolic subgroups. In particular, in the case of nonuniform lattices in the real hyperbolic space ${\mathcal H}^n$, we show that the Martin boundary coincides with the $CAT(0)$ boundary of the truncated space, and thus when n = 3, is homeomorphic to the Sierpinski carpet., Oberwolfach Preprints;2018,03

Let $$\Gamma $$ be a relatively hyperbolic group and let $$\mu $$ be an admissible symmetric finitely supported probability measure on $$\Gamma $$ . We extend Floyd–Ancona type inequalities from Gekhtman et al. (Martin boundary covers Floyd boundary, 2017. arXiv:1708.02133 ) up to the spectral radius R of $$\mu $$ . We use them to find the precise homeomorphism type of the r-Martin boundary, which describes r-harmonic functions, for every $$r\le R$$ . We also define a notion of spectral degeneracy along parabolic subgroups which is crucial to describe the homeomorphism type of the R-Martin boundary. Finally, we give a criterion for (strong) stability of the Martin boundary in the sense of Picardello and Woess (in: Potential theory, de Gruyter, 1992) in terms of spectral degeneracy. We then prove that this criterion is always satisfied in small rank, so that in particular, the Martin boundary of an admissible symmetric finitely supported probability measure on a geometrically finite Kleinian group of dimension at most 5 is always strongly stable.

Let $X$ be a proper geodesic Gromov hyperbolic metric space and let $G$ be a cocompact group of isometries of $X$ admitting a uniform lattice. Let $d$ be the Hausdorff dimension of the Gromov boundary $\partial X$. We define the critical exponent $\delta(\mu)$ of any discrete invariant random subgroup $\mu$ of the locally compact group $G$ and show that $\delta(\mu) > \frac{d}{2}$ in general and that $\delta(\mu) = d$ if $\mu$ is of divergence type. Whenever $G$ is a rank-one simple Lie group with Kazhdan's property $(T)$ it follows that an ergodic invariant random subgroup of divergence type is a lattice. One of our main tools is a maximal ergodic theorem for actions of hyperbolic groups due to Bowen and Nevo., Comment: Accepted to be published in GAFA

For finitely supported random walks on finitely generated groups $G$ we prove that the identity map on $G$ extends to a continuous equivariant surjection from the Martin boundary to the Floyd boundary, with preimages of conical points being singletons. This yields new results for relatively hyperbolic groups. Our key estimate relates the Green and Floyd metrics, generalizing results of Ancona for random walks on hyperbolic groups and of Karlsson for quasigeodesics. We then apply these techniques to obtain some results concerning the harmonic measure on the limit sets of geometrically finite isometry groups of Gromov hyperbolic spaces. .

We study the smallest positive eigenvalue $\lambda_1(M)$ of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold $M$ which fibers over the circle, with fiber a closed surface of genus $g\geq 2$. We show the existence of a constant $C>0$ only depending on $g$ so that $\lambda_1(M)\in [C^{-1}/{\rm vol}(M)^2, C\log {\rm vol}(M)/{\rm vol}(M)^{2^{2g-2}/(2^{2g-2}-1)}]$ and that this estimate is essentially sharp. We show that if $M$ is typical or random, then we have $\lambda_1(M)\in [C^{-1}/{\rm vol}(M)^2,C/{\rm vol}(M)^2]$. This rests on a result of independent interest about reccurence properties of axes of random pseudo-Anosov elements.

Let $G \curvearrowright X$ be a nonelementary action by isometries of a hyperbolic group $G$ on a hyperbolic metric space $X$. We show that the set of elements of $G$ which act as loxodromic isometries of $X$ is generic. That is, for any finite generating set of $G$, the proportion of $X$--loxodromics in the ball of radius $n$ about the identity in $G$ approaches $1$ as $n \to \infty$. We also establish several results about the behavior in $X$ of the images of typical geodesic rays in $G$; for example, we prove that they make linear progress in $X$ and converge to the Gromov boundary $\partial X$. Our techniques make use of the automatic structure of $G$, Patterson--Sullivan measure on $\partial G$, and the ergodic theory of random walks for groups acting on hyperbolic spaces. We discuss various applications, in particular to Mod(S), Out($F_N$), and right--angled Artin groups.