arXiv research

Study finite group actions on aspherical manifolds, proving rigidity and symmetry bounds.

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…

The study of $PD_3$-pairs extends results for aspherical 3-manifolds.

Nilpotent Sasakian manifolds are Heisenberg nilmanifolds.

This paper contains examples of closed aspherical manifolds obtained as a by-product of recent work by the author [arXiv:math.GR/0509490] on the relative strict hyperbolization of polyhedra. The following is proved. (I) Any closed aspherical triangulated n-manifold M^n with hyperbolic fundamental group is a retract of …

Aspherical manifolds with bounded curvature have non-trivial abelian subgroups in their fundamental groups.

Study aspherical manifolds with boundaries, proving homological criteria.

Study symplectically aspherical Kähler manifolds with unique properties.

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

Let $G/H$ be a contractible homogeneous Sasaki manifold. A compact locally homogeneous aspherical Sasaki manifold $Γ\big\backslash G/H$ is by definition a quotient of $G/H$ by a discrete uniform subgroup $Γ\leq G$. We show that a compact locally homogeneous aspherical Sasaki manifold is always quasi-regular, that is, $…

The study shows that certain cubical presentations lead to aspherical spaces.

Using small cancellation for rotating families of groups, we construct new examples of aspherical polyhedra.

We define a new class of irreducible groups, called groups not infinite-index presentable by products or not IIPP. We prove that certain aspherical manifolds with fundamental groups not IIPP do not admit maps of non-zero degree from direct products. This extends previous results of Kotschick and Loeh, providing new cla…

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 …

Study new bounds on TC of spaces with subgroup inclusions.

We show that the aspherical manifolds produced via the relative strict hyperbolization of polyhedra enjoy many group-theoretic and topological properties of open finite volume negatively pinched manifolds, including relative hyperbolicity, nonvanishing of simplicial volume, co-Hopf property, finiteness of outer automor…

The paper explores automorphism groups of parabolic structures on aspherical manifolds.

We study aspherical manifolds that do not support Anosov diffeomorphisms. Weakening conditions of Gogolev and Lafont, we show that the product of an infranilmanifold with finitely many aspherical manifolds whose fundamental groups have trivial center and finite outer automorphism group does not support Anosov diffeomor…

We establish isosystolic inequalities for a class of manifolds which includes the aspherical manifolds. In particular, we relate the systolic volume of aspherical manifolds first to their minimal entropy, then to the algebraic entropy of their fundamental groups.

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…

Study finite group actions on exotic aspherical space forms.

Let $U$ be an arbitrary word in letters $x_1^{\pm 1}, ..., x_m^{\pm 1}$ and $m \ge 2$. We prove that the group presentation $<x_1, ..., x_m \|\ U x_i U^{-1} = x_{i+1}, i=1,..., m-1>$ is aspherical. The proof is based upon prior partial results of A. Klyachko and the author on the asphericity of such presentations.

Every compact aspherical Riemannian manifold admits a canonical series of orbibundle structures with infrasolv fibers which is called its infrasolv tower. The tower arises from the solvable radicals of isometry group actions on the universal covers. Its length and the geometry of its base measure the degree of continuo…

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

Study of circle configurations in the plane, proving aspherical space and computing fundamental groups.

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

Cobordism and signatures of manifolds with similar fundamental groups.

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

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 construct aspherical closed orientable 5-manifolds with perfect fundamental group. This completes part of our study (with D.H.Kochloukova and I.Lima) of $PD_n$-groups with pro-$p$ completion a pro-$p$ Poincaré duality group of dimension $\leq{n-2}$. We also consider the question of whether there are any examples wit…

The paper proves spaces associated to certain cubical presentations are aspherical.

We use the reflection group trick to glue manifolds with corners that are Borel-Serre compactifications of locally symmetric spaces of noncompact type and obtain aspherical manifolds. We call these \emph{piecewise locally symmetric} manifolds. This class of spaces provide new examples of aspherical manifolds whose fund…

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

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, …

Novikov conjecture reduced to Lipschitz cohomology of groups.

Study simplicial volume in fiber bundles with connected groups.

We prove that a circle bundle over a closed oriented aspherical manifold with hyperbolic fundamental group admits a self-map of absolute degree greater than one if and only if it is virtually trivial. This generalizes in every dimension the case of circle bundles over hyperbolic surfaces, for which the result was known…

Study minimal volume entropy for free-by-cyclic groups and 2D right-angled Artin groups.

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

A 5-manifold fibers over a circle with nonpositive curvature.

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.

New findings on hyperbolic groups and their boundaries.

Study pro-$p$ completions of orientable PD_n groups, proving best results in three cases.

Proves conjecture on graph configuration spaces' complexity.

For n>6, we show that if G is a torsion-free hyperbolic group whose visual boundary is an (n-2)-dimensional Sierpinski space, then G=π_1(W) for some aspherical n-manifold W with nonempty boundary. Concerning the converse, we construct, for each n>3, examples of aspherical manifolds with boundary, whose fundamental grou…

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 …

We describe the second homotopy group of any CW-complex $K$ by analyzing the universal cover of a locally finite model of $K$ using the notion of $G$-coloring of a partially ordered set. As applications we prove a generalization of the Hurewicz theorem, which relates the homotopy and homology of non-necessarily simply-…

The main goal of this paper is to give the first examples of equivariant aspherical Poincare complexes, that are not realized by group actions on closed aspherical manifolds $M$. These will also provide new counterexamples to the Nielsen realization problem about lifting homotopy actions of finite groups to honest grou…