Stable cylinders and fine structures for hyperbolic groups and curve graphs

Abstract

In 1995, Rips and Sela asked if torsionfree hyperbolic groups admit globally stable cylinders. We establish this property for all residually finite hyperbolic groups and curve graphs of finite-type surfaces. These cylinders are fine objects, and the core of our approach is to upgrade the hyperbolic space to one with improved fine properties via a generalisation of Sageev's construction. The methods also let us prove that curve graphs of surfaces admit equivariant quasiisometric embeddings in finite products of quasitrees.