Coarse median structures and homomorphisms from Kazhdan groups

Abstract

We study Bowditch’s notion of a coarse median on a metric space and formally introduce the concept of a coarse median structure as an equivalence class of coarse medians up to closeness. We show that a group which possesses a uniformly left-invariant coarse median structure admits only finitely many conjugacy classes of homomorphisms from a given group with Kazhdan’s property (T). This is a common generalization of a theorem due to Paulin about the outer automorphism group of a hyperbolic group with property (T) as well as of a result of Behrstock–Druţu–Sapir on the mapping class groups of orientable surfaces. We discuss a metric approximation property of finite subsets in coarse median spaces extending the classical result on approximation of Gromov hyperbolic spaces by trees.