A Liouville hyperbolic souvlaki

Abstract

We construct a transient bounded-degree graph no transient subgraph of which embeds in any surface of finite genus. Moreover, we construct a transient, Liouville, bounded-degree, Gromov–hyperbolic graph with trivial hyperbolic boundary that has no transient subtree. This answers a question of Benjamini. This graph also yields a (further) counterexample to a conjecture of Benjamini and Schramm. In an appendix by Gábor Pete and Gourab Ray, our construction is extended to yield a unimodular graph with the above properties.