A metric between quasi-isometric trees

Abstract

It is known that PQ-symmetric maps on the boundary characterize the quasi-isometry type of visual hyperbolic spaces, in particular, of geodesically complete \br-trees. We define a map on pairs of PQ-symmetric ultrametric spaces which characterizes the branching of the space. We also show that, when the ultrametric spaces are the corresponding end spaces, this map defines a metric between rooted geodesically complete simplicial trees with minimal vertex degree 3 in the same quasi-isometry class. Moreover, this metric measures how far are the trees from being rooted isometric.