Random walks beyond hyperbolic groups

April 11 to April 15, 2022

at the

American Institute of Mathematics, San Jose, California

organized by

Joseph Maher, Yulan Qing, and Giulio Tiozzo

Original Announcement

This workshop will be devoted to extending results on random walks known for Lie groups or hyperbolic groups, to the more general class of groups which have actions on (non-proper) Gromov hyperbolic spaces.

There is a well-developed theory of random walks on word hyperbolic groups, extending the original development of random walks on Lie groups and their discrete subgroups. Recently, there has been much work in geometric group theory studying larger classes of groups which need not be hyperbolic, but act on (non-proper) hyperbolic spaces. Examples include relatively hyperbolic groups, acylindrical groups, WPD groups and weakly hyperbolic groups.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together people with expertise in geometric group theory, ergodic theory, probability and related areas to develop the theory of random walks on groups of isometries of hyperbolic spaces and other metric spaces, addressing several open problems.

The main topics for the workshop are:

Material from the workshop

A list of participants.

The workshop schedule.

A report on the workshop activities.

A list of open problems.

Workshop Videos

Papers arising from the workshop:

Random walks on groups and superlinear divergent geodesics
by  Kunal Chawla, Inhyeok Choi, Vivian He, Kasra Rafi
Random divergence of groups
by  Antoine Goldsborough, Alessandro Sisto
Random walk speed is a proper function on Teichmüller space
by  Aitor Azemar, Vaibhav Gadre, Sébastien Gouëzel, Thomas Haettel, Pablo Lessa, Caglar Uyanik
The Poisson boundary of hyperbolic groups without moment conditions
by  Kunal Chawla, Behrang Forghani, Joshua Frisch, Giulio Tiozzo