Ideal bicombings for hyperbolic groups and applications

Abstract

For every hyperbolic group and more general hyperbolic graphs, we construct an equivariant ideal bicombing: this is a homological analogue of the geodesic flow on negatively curved manifolds. We then construct a cohomological invariant which implies that several Measure Equivalence and Orbit Equivalence rigidity results established in Monod and Shalom (Orbit equivalence rigidity and bounded cohomology, preprint, to appear) hold for all non-elementary hyperbolic groups and their non-elementary subgroups. We also derive superrigidity results for actions of general irreducible lattices on a large class of hyperbolic metric spaces.