Peripheral fillings of relatively hyperbolic groups

A group theoretic version of Dehn surgery is studied. Starting with an arbitrary relatively hyperbolic group $G$ we define a peripheral filling procedure, which produces quotients of $G$ by imitating the effect of the Dehn filling of a complete finite volume hyperbolic 3--manifold $M$ on the fundamental group $\pi_1(M)$. The main result of the paper is an algebraic counterpart of Thurston's hyperbolic Dehn surgery theorem. We also show that peripheral subgroups of $G$ 'almost' have the Congruence Extension Property and the group $G$ is approximated (in an algebraic sense) by its quotients obtained by peripheral fillings. Various applications of these results are discussed.Comment: The difference with the previous version is that Proposition 3.2 is proved for quasi--geodesics instead of geodesics. This allows to simplify the exposition in the last section. To appear in Invent. Mat

On commensurable hyperbolic Coxeter groups

For Coxeter groups acting non-cocompactly but with finite covolume on real hyperbolic space Hn, new methods are presented to distinguish them up to (wide) commensurability. We exploit these ideas and determine the commensurability classes of all hyperbolic Coxeter groups whose fundamental polyhedra are pyramids over a product of two simplices of positive dimensions