Symbolic coding for the geodesic flow associated to a word hyperbolic group

Abstract.

 Let Γ be a word hyperbolic group M. Gromov has constructed a compact space equipped with a flow which is defined up to orbit-equivalence and which is called the geodesic flow of Γ. In the special case where Γ is the fundamental group of a Riemannian manifold of negative sectional curvature, is the unit tangent bundle of the manifold equipped with the usual geodesic flow. In this paper, we construct, for every hyperbolic group Γ, a subshift of finite type and a continuous map from the suspension of this subshift onto , which is uniformly bounded-to-one and which sends each orbit of the suspension flow onto an orbit of the geodesic flow.