Gromov-Hausdorff convergence of maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces and their boundaries

Abstract

The relation between negatively curved spaces and their boundaries is important for various rigidity problems. In \cite{biswas2024quasi}, the class of Gromov hyperbolic spaces called maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces was introduced, and the boundary functor $X \mapsto \partial X$ was shown to give an equivalence of categories between maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces (with morphisms being isometries) and a class of compact quasi-metric spaces called quasi-metric antipodal spaces (with morphisms being Moebius homeomorphisms). The proof of this equivalence involved the construction of a filling functor $Z \mapsto {\mathcal M}(Z)$, associating to any quasi-metric antipodal space $Z$ a maximal Gromov hyperbolic space ${\mathcal M}(Z)$. We study the ``continuity" properties of the boundary and filling functors. We show that convergence of a sequence of quasi-metric antipodal spaces (in a certain sense called ``almost-isometric convergence") implies convergence (in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense) of the associated maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces. Conversely, we show that convergence of maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces together with a natural hypothesis of ``equicontinuity" on the boundaries implies convergence of boundaries. We use this to show that Gromov-Hausdorff convergence of a sequence of proper, geodesically complete CAT(-1) spaces implies Gromov-Hausdorff convergence of their boundaries equipped with visual metrics. We also show that convergence of maximal Gromov hyperbolic spaces to a maximal Gromov hyperbolic space with finite boundary implies convergence of boundaries.