arXiv research

Paper confirms Whitehead's conjecture for aspherical 2-complexes.

The paper proves the Singer conjecture for aspherical complex surfaces and refines Gromov's inequality.

Study a relative aspherical conjecture and prove 3-manifold obstruction to positive scalar curvature.

Constructs 4-manifolds with positive Euler characteristic proving a conjecture.

The paper extends a vanishing theorem for hypersurfaces in aspherical manifolds.

Researchers propose a new approach to the Hopf problem for aspherical varieties.

Study symplectically aspherical Kähler manifolds with unique properties.

Novikov conjecture reduced to Lipschitz cohomology of groups.

Proves conjecture on graph configuration spaces' complexity.

We prove that every finitely generated group with recursive aspherical presentation embeds into a group with finite aspherical presentation. This and several known facts about groups and manifolds imply that there exists a 4-dimensional closed aspherical manifold $M$ such that the fundamental group $π_1(M)$ coarsely co…

Proves non-existence of certain metrics on specific manifolds.

The paper confirms a conjecture about knots in aspherical 3-manifolds.

A {\em word labeled oriented graph} (WLOG) is an oriented graph $\cal G$ on vertices $X=\{ x_1,\ldots ,x_k\}$, where each oriented edge is labeled by a word in $X^{\pm1}$. WLOGs give rise to presentations which generalize Wirtinger presentations of knots. WLOG presentations, where the underlying graph is a tree are of …

New 4D shapes found that defy smoothness rules.

We show that a generic Hamiltonian diffeomorphism on a closed symplectic manifold which is symplectically aspherical has at least the stable Morse number of fixed points - this is in line with a conjecture by Arnold.

We present a new test for studying asphericity and diagrammatic reducibility of group presentations. Our test can be applied to prove diagrammatic reducibility in cases where the classical weight test fails. We use this criterion to generalize results of J. Howie and S.M. Gersten on asphericity of LOTs and of Adian pre…

We survey the recent results and current issues on the topological rigidity problem for closed aspherical manifolds, i.e., connected closed manifolds whose universal coverings are contractible. A number of open problems and conjectures are presented during the course of the discussion. We also review the status and app…

We show that in all dimensions >7 there are closed aspherical manifolds whose fundamental groups have nontrivial center but do not possess any topological circle actions. This disproves a conjectured converse (proposed by Conner and Raymond) to a classical theorem of Borel.

The paper defines and explores Coxeter type LOTs for ribbon 2-knots.

The Cannon Conjecture for a torsionfree hyperbolic group G with boundary homeomorphic to S^2 says that G is the fundamental group of an aspherical closed 3-manifold M. It is known that then M is a hyperbolic 3-manifold. We prove the stable version that for any closed manifold N of dimension greater or equal to 2 there …

Proof of $K(π, 1)$ conjecture for affine Artin groups.

This paper studies limits of aspherical manifolds with specific curvature conditions.

We present sufficient conditions for the cohomology of a closed aspherical manifold to be proper Lipschitz in sense of Connes-Gromov-Moscovici [CGM]. The conditions are stated in terms of the Stone-Čech compactification of the universal cover of a manifold. We show that these conditions are formally weaker than the suf…

Non-asphericity of strata of genus-one differentials

The paper describes the structure of injective LOT-complexes and proves they are aspherical.

Proves connection between $\ell^2$-Betti numbers and BNSR invariants.

This is a survey on known results and open problems about closed aspherical manifolds, i.e., connected closed manifolds whose universal coverings are contractible. Many examples come from certain kinds of non-positive curvature conditions. The property aspherical which is a purely homotopy theoretical condition implies…

New findings on hyperbolic groups and their boundaries.

A topological version of a longstanding conjecture of H. Hopf, originally proposed by W. Thurston, states that the sign of the Euler characteristic of a closed aspherical manifold of dimension $d=2m$ depends only on the parity of $m$. Gromov defined several hyperbolization functors which produce an aspherical manifold …

Kervaire's sphere-link is equivalent to a ribbon sphere-link, simplifying complex 2-complexes.

In this short note we prove the Borel conjecture for a family of aspherical manifolds that includes higher graph manifolds.

We classify all closed, aspherical Riemannian manifolds M whose universal cover has indiscrete isometry group. One sample application is the theorem that any such M with word-hyperbolic fundamental group must be isometric to a negatively curved, locally symmetric manifold. Another application is the classification of a…

We show that closed aspherical manifolds supporting an affine structure, whose holonomy map is injective and contains a pure translation, must have vanishing simplicial volume. This provides some further evidence for the veracity of the Auslander Conjecture. Along the way, we provide a simple cohomological criterion fo…

A labeled oriented graph (LOG) is an oriented graph with a labeling function from the edge set into the vertex set. The complexity of a LOG is the minimal cardinality of an initial set $S$ of vertices such that every vertex can be reached successively from $S$ only using edges with labels in $S$ or already visited vert…

We prove the Conley conjecture for a closed symplectically aspherical symplectic manifold: a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a such a manifold has infinitely many periodic points. More precisely, we show that a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism with finitely many fixed points has simple periodic points of arbitrarily large peri…

Let M be a closed, orientable, irreducible, non-simply connected 3-manifold. We prove that if M admits a sequence of Riemannian metrics whose sectional curvature is locally controlled and whose thick part becomes asymptotically hyperbolic and has a sufficiently small volume, then M is Seifert fibred or contains an inco…

The Borel Conjecture predicts that closed aspherical manifolds are topological rigid. We want to investigate when a non-aspherical oriented connected closed manifold M is topological rigid in the following sense. If f: N --> M is an orientation preserving homotopy equivalence with a closed oriented manifold as target, …

We survey recent developments which led to the proof of the Benson-Gordon conjecture on Kähler quotients of solvable Lie groups. In addition we prove that the Albanese morphism of a Kähler manifold which is a homotopy torus is a biholomorphic map. The latter result then implies the classification of compact aspherical …

The study connects manifold topology to metrics with positive intermediate curvature.

We study random 2-dimensional complexes in the Linial - Meshulam model and find torsion in their fundamental groups at various regimes. We find a simple algorithmically testable criterion for a subcomplex of a random 2-complex to be aspherical; this implies that any aspherical subcomplex of a random 2-complex satisfies…

Classifies 4-manifolds with elementary amenable groups and their boundaries.

We address a conjecture that $π_1$-surjective maps between closed aspherical 3-manifolds having the same rank on $π_1$ must be of non-zero degree. The conjecture is proved for Seifert manifolds, which is used in constructing the first known example of minimum Haken manifold. Another motivation is to study epimorphisms …

The Gauss-Bonnet inequality holds for certain non-aspherical manifolds up to dimension five.

We show that there can be no algorithm to decide whether infinite recursively described acyclic aspherical 2-complexes are contractible. We construct such a complex that is contractible if and only if the Collatz conjecture holds.

Surveying topological complexity of graph configurations, unifying traditional and modern approaches.

Given a reducible $3$-manifold $M$ with an aspherical summand in its prime decomposition and a homeomorphism $f\colon M\to M$, we construct a map of degree one from a finite cover of $M\rtimes_f S^1$ to a mapping torus of a certain aspherical $3$-manifold. We deduce that $M\rtimes_f S^1$ has virtually infinite first Be…

The paper classifies homotopy ribbon discs with specific groups.

The n-string braid group of a graph X is defined as the fundamental group of the n-point configuration space of the space X. This configuration space is a finite dimensional aspherical space. A. Abrams and R. Ghrist have conjectured that this braid group is a right angled Artin group if X is planar. We prove their conj…