Carathéodory distance-preserving maps between bounded symmetric domains

Abstract We study the rigidity of maps between bounded symmetric domains that preserve the Carathéodory/Kobayashi distance. We show that such maps are only possible when the rank of the co-domain is at least as great as that of the domain. When the ranks are equal, and the domain is irreducible, we prove that the map is either holomorphic or antiholomorphic. In the holomorphic case, we show that the map is in fact a triple homomorphism, under the additional assumption that the origin is mapped to the origin. We exploit the large-scale geometry of the Carathéodory distance and use the horocompactification and Gromov product to obtain these results without requiring any smoothness assumptions on the maps.