We prove that the existence of one horosphere in the universal cover of a closed Riemannian manifold of dimension $n \geq 3$ with strongly $1/4$-pinched or relatively $1/2$-pinched sectional curvature, on which the stable holonomy along one horosphere coincides with the Riemannian parallel transport, implies that the manifold is homothetic to a real hyperbolic manifold.

We study the growth of fibers of coverings of pinched negatively curved Riemannian manifolds. The applications include counting estimates for horoballs in the universal cover of geometrically finite manifolds with cusps. Continuing our work on diophantine approximation in negatively curved manifolds started in an earlier paper (Math. Zeit.241 (2002), 181–226), we prove a Khintchine–Sullivan-type theorem giving the Hausdorff measure of the geodesic lines starting from a cusp that are well approximated by the cusp returning ones.

Let M be a geometrically finite pinched negatively curved Riemannian manifold with at least one cusp. The asymptotics of the number of geodesics in M starting from and returning to a given cusp, and of the number of horoballs at parabolic fixed points in the universal cover of M, are studied in this paper. The case of SL(2, ℤ), and of Bianchi groups, is developed.

Let $T$ be a locally finite simplicial tree and let $\Gamma\subset{\rm Aut}(T)$ be a finitely generated discrete subgroup. We obtain an explicit formula for the critical exponent of the Poincaré series associated with $\Gamma$, which is also the Hausdorff dimension of the limit set of $\Gamma$; this uses a description due to Lubotzky of an appropriate fundamental domain for finite index torsion-free subgroups of $\Gamma$. Coornaert, generalizing work of Sullivan, showed that the limit set is of finite positive measure in its dimension; we give a new proof of this result. Finally, we show that the critical exponent is locally constant on the space of deformations of $\Gamma$.