Cohomological characterisation of hyperbolicity

Abstract

For any geodesic metric space $X$, we give a complete cohomological characterisation of the hyperbolicity of $X$ in terms of vanishing of its second ${\ell }^{\infty }$-cohomology. We extend this result to the relative setting of $X$ with a collection of uniformly hyperbolic subgraphs. As an application, we give a cohomological characterisation of acylindrical hyperbolicity.

27 pages, 4 figures. Minor corrections, final version. To appear in IMRN