When are Carnot groups complete and negatively curved (in the sense of $CAT(\kappa)$ spaces)?
$\begingroup$
$\endgroup$
8
-
2$\begingroup$ Only abelian ones. It's a theorem of Pauls that a nonabelian simply connected nilpotent groups can't even QI embed into any CAT(0) space. $\endgroup$– YCorCommented May 1, 2019 at 11:43
-
$\begingroup$ Interesting! This i did not know. $\endgroup$– ABIMCommented May 1, 2019 at 11:46
-
$\begingroup$ Abelian Carnot groups are isometric to Euclidean spaces. So no, they're not negatively curved (in dimension $\ge 2$) although they're non-positively curved. $\endgroup$– YCorCommented May 1, 2019 at 11:47
-
$\begingroup$ Do you have a reference to this paper, by any chance? $\endgroup$– ABIMCommented May 1, 2019 at 12:05
-
2$\begingroup$ Scott D. Pauls. The large scale geometry in nilpotent Lie groups. Commun. Anal. Geom. 9(5), 951-982, 2001. However, the result that every Carnot group of dimension $\ge 2$ is not CAT($-\kappa$) for $\kappa>0$ is straightforward. Indeed, since it has a non-isometric self-homothety, it would imply that it is CAT($-\kappa'$) for every $\kappa'>0$, and hence CAT($-\infty$), which for a geodesic space means an $\mathbf{R}$-tree, which cannot have any subset homeomorphic to the plane. $\endgroup$– YCorCommented May 1, 2019 at 12:12
|
Show 3 more comments
1 Answer
$\begingroup$
$\endgroup$
All Carnot groups are complete metric spaces, since they have all closed balls compact ("proper" metric space). In general, any metric space with a transitive isometry group, and having a compact subset with nonempty interior, is complete (easy exercise).
The result that every Carnot group of dimension $\ge 2$ is not CAT($−\kappa$) for any $\kappa>0$ is straightforward. Indeed, since it has a non-isometric self-homothety, it would imply that it is CAT($−\kappa'$) for every $\kappa'>0$, and hence CAT($-\infty$), which for a geodesic space means an $\mathbf{R}$-tree, which cannot have any subset homeomorphic to the plane.
Actually, a non-abelian Carnot group is not even CAT(0), and does not even have a quasi-isometric embedding into any CAT(0) space (or any uniformly convex Banach space). The latter fact was established in:
Scott D. Pauls. The large scale geometry in nilpotent Lie groups. Commun. Anal. Geom. 9(5), 951-982, 2001. However,