Every complete, connected, simply-connected manifold of constant negative curvature is isometric to the real hyperbolic space . As a result, the universal cover of any closed manifold of constant negative curvature is . Thus, every such can be written as where is a torsion-free discrete group of isometries on . That is, is a discrete subgroup of . The manifold has finite volume if and only if is a lattice.
Its thick–thin decomposition has a thin part consisting of tubular neighborhoods of closed geodesics and ends which are the product of a Euclidean ()-manifold and the closed half-ray. The manifold is of finite volume if and only if its thick part is compact.
Examples
The simplest example of a hyperbolic manifold is hyperbolic space, as each point in hyperbolic space has a neighborhood isometric to hyperbolic space.
A simple non-trivial example, however, is the once-punctured torus. This is an example of an (Isom(), )-manifold. This can be formed by taking an ideal rectangle in – that is, a rectangle where the vertices are on the boundary at infinity, and thus don't exist in the resulting manifold – and identifying opposite images.
In a similar fashion, we can construct the thrice-punctured sphere, shown below, by gluing two ideal triangles together. This also shows how to draw curves on the surface – the black line in the diagram becomes the closed curve when the green edges are glued together. As we are working with a punctured sphere, the colored circles in the surface – including their boundaries – are not part of the surface, and hence are represented in the diagram as ideal vertices.
For the hyperbolic structure on a finite volume hyperbolic -manifold is unique by Mostow rigidity and so geometric invariants are in fact topological invariants. One of these geometric invariants used as a topological invariant is the hyperbolic volume of a knot or link complement, which can allow us to distinguish two knots from each other by studying the geometry of their respective manifolds.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Hyperbolic_manifold, and is written by contributors.
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