Cohomological Characterisation of Hyperbolicity

Abstract For any geodesic metric space $X$, we give a complete cohomological characterisation of the hyperbolicity of $X$ in terms of vanishing of its second $\ell ^{\infty }$-cohomology. We extend this result to the relative setting of $X$ with a collection of uniformly hyperbolic subgraphs. As an application, we give a cohomological characterisation of acylindrical hyperbolicity.