NATURAL MAPS FOR MEASURABLE COCYCLES OF COMPACT HYPERBOLIC MANIFOLDS

Abstract

Abstract Let $\operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm G}}}(n)$ be equal to either $\operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm PO}}}(n,1),\operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm PU}}}(n,1)$ or $\operatorname {\mathrm {\textrm {PSp}}}(n,1)$ and let $\Gamma \leq \operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm G}}}(n)$ be a uniform lattice. Denote by $\operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^n_{{\rm K}}}}$ the hyperbolic space associated to $\operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm G}}}(n)$ , where $\operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm K}}}$ is a division algebra over the reals of dimension d. Assume $d(n-1) \geq 2$ . In this article we generalise natural maps to measurable cocycles. Given a standard Borel probability $\Gamma $ -space $(X,\mu _X)$ , we assume that a measurable cocycle $\sigma :\Gamma \times X \rightarrow \operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm G}}}(m)$ admits an essentially unique boundary map $\phi :\partial _\infty \operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^n_{{\rm K}}}} \times X \rightarrow \partial _\infty \operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^m_{{\rm K}}}}$ whose slices $\phi _x:\operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^n_{{\rm K}}}} \rightarrow \operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^m_{{\rm K}}}}$ are atomless for almost every $x \in X$ . Then there exists a $\sigma $ -equivariant measurable map $F: \operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^n_{{\rm K}}}} \times X \rightarrow \operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^m_{{\rm K}}}}$ whose slices $F_x:\operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^n_{{\rm K}}}} \rightarrow \operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^m_{{\rm K}}}}$ are differentiable for almost every $x \in X$ and such that $\operatorname {\mathrm {\textrm {Jac}}}_a F_x \leq 1$ for every $a \in \operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^n_{{\rm K}}}}$ and almost every $x \in X$ . This allows us to define the natural volume $\operatorname {\mathrm {\textrm {NV}}}(\sigma )$ of the cocycle $\sigma $ . This number satisfies the inequality $\operatorname {\mathrm {\textrm {NV}}}(\sigma ) \leq \operatorname {\mathrm {\textrm {Vol}}}(\Gamma \backslash \operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbb {H}^n_{{\rm K}}}})$ . Additionally, the equality holds if and only if $\sigma $ is cohomologous to the cocycle induced by the standard lattice embedding $i:\Gamma \rightarrow \operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm G}}}(n) \leq \operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm G}}}(m)$ , modulo possibly a compact subgroup of $\operatorname {\mathrm {{\rm G}}}(m)$ when $m>n$ . Given a continuous map $f:M \rightarrow N$ between compact hyperbolic manifolds, we also obtain an adaptation of the mapping degree theorem to this context.