Uniform small cancellation in torsion-free hyperbolic groups

Abstract

We establish a uniform small cancellation theorem for non-elementary torsion-free hyperbolic groups: given any prescribed small cancellation constant, finitely many fixed words suffice to produce a small cancellation element from every pair of noncommuting elements. As an application, we prove that the first-order theory of every non-elementary torsion-free hyperbolic group does not admit a model companion.