The ping-pong lemma was introduced by Klein in the late 1800s to show that certain subgroups of isometries of hyperbolic 3-space are free and remains one of very few tools that certify when a pair of group elements generate a free subgroup or semigroup. Quantitatively applying the ping-pong lemma to more general group actions on metric spaces requires a blend of understanding the large-scale global geometry of the underlying space with local combinatorial and dynamical behavior of the action. In the 1980s, Gromov publish a sequence of seminal works introducing several metric notions of non-positive curvature in group theory where he asked which finitely generated groups have uniform exponential growth. We give an overview of various developments of non-positive curvature in group theory and past results related to building free semigroups in the setting of non-positive curvature. We highlight joint work with Radhika Gupta and Kasia Jankiewicz and with Carolyn Abbott and Davide Spriano that extends these tools and techniques to show several groups with that act on cube complexes and many hierarchically hyperbolic groups have uniform exponential growth. / Mathematics

L'objet de cette thèse est l'étude de revêtements ramifiés V' to V de variétés hyperboliques compactes V cubiques, c'est-à-dire dont le groupe fondamental pi_1(V) opère proprement et cocompactement sur un complexe cubique CAT(0). Notre première approche consiste à construire un complexe cubique localement CAT(0) comme revêtement ramifié du complexe obtenu par cubulation de V. La difficulté est alors de vérifier que ce complexe a le même groupe fondamental que V’. On réalise ce programme dans le cas ou V’ est une « variété de Gromov-Thurston ». Notre seconde approche concerne plus généralement le cas où le lieu de ramification du revêtement V' to V est contenu dans une sous-variété convexe de codimension 1. La préimage de cette variété dans V’ puis dans le revêtement universel X’ de V’ fournit un système naturel de « murs ». La difficulté consiste alors à montrer que ces murs séparent linéairement X’ afin d'utiliser les théorèmes classiques de cubulation. / The goal of this thesis is to study of branched covers V' to V of closed hyperbolic manifolds that can be cubulated, i.e. Whose fundamental group pi_1(V) acts properly and cocompactly on a CAT(0) cube complex. We give sufficient conditions for pi_1(V') to be cubic as well.We tackle this question in two different ways. In a first approach we build a negatively curved cubical complex as a ramified cover of a cubical complex obtained by cubulating V. Then the main issue is to check that the fundamental group of this complexe is isomorphic to the fundamental group of V'. We manage to do so when V' is so called “Gromov-Thurston manifold “. Our second approach deals with the more general case where the branched locus of V' to V is contained in a codimension 1 convex submanifold. The preimage of this submanifold on V' and on the universal cover X' of V' provides a natural system of “walls”. Then the main issue is to show that these walls linearly separate X'. This enables us to use classical cubulation theorems.