Negligibility of parabolic elements in relatively hyperbolic groups

Abstract

We study density of parabolic elements in a finitely generated relatively hyperbolic group $G$ with respect to a word metric. We prove this density to be zero (apart from degenerate cases) and the limit defining the density to converge exponentially fast; this has recently been proven independently by W. Yang. As a corollary, we obtain the analogous result for the set of commuting pairs of elements in $G^2$, showing that the degree of commutativity of $G$ is equal to zero.