Strong bolicity and the Baum-Connes conjecture for relatively hyperbolic groups

Abstract: We construct a strongly bolic metric for a certain class of relatively hyperbolic groups, which includes those with CAT(0) parabolics and virtually abelian parabolics. If we further assume that the parabolics satisfy (RD), applying a theorem of Lafforgue, we deduce the Baum-Connes conjecture for these groups. One of the key ingredients in our construction is the use of random coset representatives called masks, developed by Chatterji and Dahmani.