Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2018
We show that if a finitely generated group $G$ has a nonelementary WPD action on a hyperbolic metric space $X$, then the number of $G$-conjugacy classes of $X$-loxodromic elements of $G$ coming from a ball of radius $R$ in the Cayley graph of $G$ grows exponentially in $R$. As an application we prove that for $N\geq 3$ the number of distinct $\text{Out}(F_{N})$-conjugacy classes of fully irreducible elements $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ from an $R$-ball in the Cayley graph of $\text{Out}(F_{N})$ with $\log \unicode[STIX]{x1D706}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719})$ of the order of $R$ grows exponentially in $R$.
The second author was supported by the individual NSF grants DMS-1405146 and DMS-1710868. Both authors acknowledge the support of the conference grant DMS-1719710 ‘Conference on Groups and Computation’.