Deformations of hyperbolic 3-cone-manioflds

Abstract

We show that any compact orientable hyperbolic 3-cone-manifold with cone angle at most πcan be continuously deformed to a complete hyperbolic manifold homeomorphic to the complement of the singularity. This together with the local rigidity by Hodgson and Kerckhoff implies the global rigidity for compact orientable hyperbolic 3-cone-manifolds under the same angle assumption.

to appear in J. Differential Geom