The non-positive curvature geometry of some fundamental groups of complex hyperplane arrangement complements

A complex hyperplane complement is a topological space obtained by removing a collection of complex codimension one affine hyperplanes from C^n (or a convex cone of C^n). Despite the simple definition, these spaces have highly non-trivial topology. They naturally emerge from the study of real and complex reflection groups, braid groups and configuration spaces, and Artin groups. More recently, the fundamental groups of some of these spaces start to play important roles in geometric group theory, though most of these groups remain rather mysterious. We introduce a geometric way to understand classes of fundamental groups of some of these spaces, by equivariantly “thickening” these groups to metric spaces which satisfy a specific geometric property that is closely related to convexity and non-positive curvature. We also discuss several algorithmic, geometric and topological consequences of such a non-positive curvature condition. This is joint work with D. Osajda.