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Comparing the Roller and B(X) boundaries of CAT(0) cube complexes

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Abstract

The Roller boundary is a well-known compactification of a CAT(0) cube complex X. When X is locally finite, essential, irreducible, non-Euclidean and admits a cocompact action by a group G, Nevo—Sageev show that a subset, B(X), of the Roller boundary is the realization of the Poisson boundary and that the action of G on B(X) is minimal and strongly proximal. Additionally, these authors show B(X) satisfies many other desirable dynamical and topological properties. In this article we give several equivalent characterizations for when B(X) is equal to the entire Roller boundary. As an application we show, under mild hypotheses, that if X is also 2-dimensional then X is G-equivariantly quasi-isometric to a CAT(0) cube complex X′ whose Roller boundary is equal to B(X′). Additionally, we use our characterization to show that the usual CAT(0) cube complex for which an infinite right-angled Coxeter/Artin group acts on geometrically has Roller boundary equal to B(X), as long as the corresponding group does not decompose as a direct product.

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply thankful to Michah Sageev for directing me towards this area of research and for the many fruitful discussions regarding this work. I would also like to thank Nir Lazarovich for helpful discussions regarding cube complexes. I am very thankful to the anonymous referee for excellent suggestions which led to the simplification of several arguments and a strengthening of Proposition 8.1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 32000, Israel

    Ivan Levcovitz

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  1. Ivan Levcovitz
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Correspondence to Ivan Levcovitz.

Additional information

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation and in part by a Technion fellowship.

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Levcovitz, I. Comparing the Roller and B(X) boundaries of CAT(0) cube complexes. Isr. J. Math. 242, 129–170 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11856-021-2126-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11856-021-2126-0

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