Counting double cosets with application to generic 3-manifolds

Abstract

We study the growth of double cosets in the class of groups with contracting elements, including relatively hyperbolic groups, CAT(0) groups and mapping class groups among others. Generalizing a recent work of Gitik and Rips about hyperbolic groups, we prove that the double coset growth of two Morse subgroups of infinite index is comparable with the orbital growth function. The same result is further obtained for a more general class of subgroups whose limit sets are proper subsets in the entire limit set of the ambient group. The limit sets under consideration are defined in a general convergence compactification, including Gromov boundary, Bowditch boundary, Thurston boundary and horofunction boundary. As an application, we confirm a conjecture of Maher that hyperbolic 3-manifolds are exponentially generic in the set of 3-manifolds built from Heegaard splitting using complexity in Teichmüller metric.