Morse subsets of injective spaces are strongly contracting

Abstract

We show that a quasi-geodesic in an injective metric space is Morse if and only if it is strongly contracting. Since mapping class groups and, more generally, hierarchically hyperbolic groups act properly and coboundedly on injective metric spaces, we deduce various consequences relating, for example, to growth tightness and genericity of pseudo-Anosovs/Morse elements. Moreover, we show that injective metric spaces have the Morse local-to-global property and that a non-virtually-cyclic group acting properly and coboundedly on an injective metric space is acylindrically hyperbolic if and only it contains a Morse ray.