Singularity of Cannon-Thurston maps

Abstract: In a closed fibered hyperbolic 3-manifold M, the inclusion of a fiber S, with S and M lifted to the universal covers gives an exponentially distorted embedding of the hyperbolic plane into hyperbolic 3-space. Nevertheless, Cannon and Thurston showed that there is a map from the circle at infinity of the hyperbolic plane to the 2-sphere at infinity of hyperbolic 3-space. The Cannon-Thurston map is surjective, finite-to-one, and gives a space-filling curve. Here we prove that many natural measures on the circle when pushed forward by the Cannon-Thurston map become singular with respect to many natural measures on the 2-sphere. The circle measures we consider are the Lebesgue measure and stationary measures that arise from fully supported random walks on the surface group. Whereas the measures on the sphere we consider are the Lebesgue measure and stationary measures that arise from geometric random walks on the 3-manifold group. The singularity of measures is ultimately derived from the following geometric result. We prove that a hyperbolic geodesic sampled with respect to a pushforward measure asymptotically spends a definite proportion of its time close to a fiber. On the other hand, we show that a hyperbolic geodesic sampled with respect to a natural measure on the sphere spends an asymptotically negligible proportion of its time close to a fiber. For a more restricted class of measures, namely the Lebesgue measure and stationary measures from geometric random walks on the surface group, we also prove an effective result for the proportion of time spent close to a fiber. To this end, we give precise descriptions if quasi-geodesics in the Cannon-Thurston metric, which may be of independent interest.