arXiv research

The simplicial volume of non-R^3 contractible 3-manifolds is infinite.

One can define what it means for a compact manifold with corners to be a "contractible manifold with contractible faces." Two combinatorially equivalent, contractible manifolds with contractible faces are diffeomorphic if and only if their 4-dimensional faces are diffeomorphic. It follows that two simple convex polytop…

Curvature conditions distinguish Euclidean space and disks in contractible manifolds.

Compact Kähler manifolds with positive curvature have contractible covers.

Establishes exponential contraction in Wasserstein distance on manifolds and flows.

Exotic diffeomorphism survives stabilizations on a contractible 4-manifold.

Whenever a finitely generated group $G$ acts properly discontinuously by isometries on a metric space $X$, there is an induced uniform embedding (a Lipschitz and uniformly proper map) $ρ: G \rightarrow X$ given by mapping $G$ to an orbit. We study when there is a difference between a finitely generated group $G$ acting…

The paper proves scalar curvature decay for uniformly contractible manifolds with finite asymptotic dimension.

Lickorish has constructed large families of contractible 4--manifolds that have knotted embeddings in the 4--sphere and has also shown that every finitely presented perfect group with balanced presentation occurs as the fundamental group of the complement of a knotted contractible manifold. Here we make a few observati…

The paper constructs contractible manifolds with knotted spheres.

Alexander trick applied to homology spheres for manifold homeomorphisms.

Non-linear Hopf manifolds can be embedded into linear ones and admit LCK metrics.

Examples are given to show that some compact contractible 4-manifolds can be knotted in the 4-sphere. It is then proved that any finitely presented perfect group with a balanced presentation is a knot group for an embedding of some contractible 4-manifold in the 4-sphere.

Study of contractible manifolds and their twists to determine if they are $S^4$.

Formula found for skinning map contraction in hyperbolic geometry.

We prove that a contractible orbifold is a manifold.

Paper tackles which 3-spheres bound contractible 4-manifolds or homology 4-balls.

There are known infinite families of Brieskorn homology 3-spheres which can be realized as boundaries of smooth contractible 4-manifolds. In this paper we show that free periodic actions on these Brieskorn spheres do not extend smoothly over a contractible 4-manifold. We give a new infinite family of examples in which …

Motivated by a recent paper of Gabai on the Whitehead contractible 3-manifold, we investigate contractible manifolds $M^n$ which decompose or split as $M^n = A \cup_C B$ where $A,B,C \approx \mathbb{R}^n$ or $A,B,C \approx \mathbb{B}^n$. Of particular interest to us is the case $n=4.$ Our main results exhibit large col…

We study contractivity properties of gradient flows for functions on normed spaces or, more generally, on Finsler manifolds. Contractivity of the flows turns out to be equivalent to a new notion of convexity for the functions. This is different from the usual convexity along geodesics in non-Riemannian Finsler manifold…

4-manifolds can be exotic after connected sum with S^2 x S^2.

Study on contracting maps and their rigidity under curvature constraints.

In this article, we are interested in the question whether any complete contractible $3$-manifold of positive scalar curvature is homeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^{3}$. We study the fundamental group at infinity, $π_{1}^{\infty}$, and its relationship with the existence of complete metrics of positive scalar curvature. We p…

Survey of recent scalar curvature results on open 3-manifolds.

Gabai showed that the Whitehead manifold is the union of two submanifolds each of which is homeomorphic to $\mathbb R^3$ and whose intersection is again homeomorphic to $\mathbb R^3$. Using a family of generalizations of the Whitehead Link, we show that there are uncountably many contractible 3-manifolds with this doub…

We give a criterion under which a solution g(t) of the Kahler-Ricci flow contracts exceptional divisors on a compact manifold and can be uniquely continued on a new manifold. As t tends to the singular time T from each direction, we prove convergence of g(t) in the sense of Gromov-Hausdorff and smooth convergence away …

In this work we prove that the Whitehead manifold has no complete metric of positive scalar curvature. This result can be generalized to the genus one case. Precisely, we show that no contractible genus one $3$-manifold admits a complete metric of positive scalar curvature.

The study proves conditions for symplectic torus actions on manifolds with non-contractible orbits.

New examples of Kirby-Ramanujam spheres found, leading to contractible 4-manifolds.

Every lattice H in a connected semi-simple Lie group G acts properly discontinuously by isometries on the contractible manifold G/K (K a maximal compact subgroup of G). We prove that if H acts on a contractible manifold W and if either 1) the action is properly discontinuous, or 2) W is equipped with a complete Riemann…

New findings show infinitely many non-homeomorphic manifolds with same proper homotopy type.

We prove that closed symplectic four-manifolds do not admit any smooth free circle actions with contractible orbits, without assuming that the actions preserve the symplectic forms. In higher dimensions such actions by symplectomorphisms do exist, and we give explicit examples based on a construction of Fernandez, Gray…

The curvature-dimension condition is a generalization of the Bochner inequality to weighted Riemannian manifolds and general metric measure spaces. It is now known to be equivalent to evolution variational inequalities for the heat semigroup, and quadratic Wasserstein distance contraction properties at different times.…

Study shows bounds on knot groups and nonembeddability of certain open manifolds.

We prove that Riemannian foliations on complete contractible manifolds have a closed leaf, and that all leaves are closed if one closed leaf has a finitely generated fundamental group. Under additional topological or geometric assumptions we prove that the foliation is also simple.

The problem of equivariant rigidity is the $Γ$-homeomorphism classification of $Γ$-actions on manifolds with compact quotient and with contractible fixed sets for all finite subgroups of $Γ$. In other words, this is the classification of cocompact $E_{fin}Γ$-manifolds. We use surgery theory, algebraic $K$-theory, and t…

This paper improves a result on homology concordance in contractible manifolds and two bridge links.

We show how to construct absolutely exotic smooth structures on compact 4-manifolds with boundary, including contractible manifolds. In particular, we prove that any compact smooth 4-manifold W with boundary that admits a relatively exotic structure contains a pair of codimension-zero submanifolds homotopy equivalent t…

The paper proves a conjecture about manifold limits and characterizes their structure.

In a recent paper, {\it Algorithms for Deforming and Contracting Simply Connected Discrete Closed Manifolds (II)}, we discussed two algorithms for deforming and contracting a simply connected discrete closed manifold into a discrete sphere. The first algorithm was a continuation of work that began in {\it Algorithms fo…

We define a new notion of contracting element of a group and we show that contracting elements coincide with hyperbolic elements in relatively hyperbolic groups, pseudo-Anosovs in mapping class groups, rank one isometries in groups acting properly on proper CAT(0) spaces, elements acting hyperbolically on the Bass-Serr…

We show that a space with a finite asymptotic dimension is embeddable in a non-positively curved manifold. Then we prove that if a uniformly contractible manifold X is uniformly embeddable in $\R^n$ or non-positively curved n-dimensional simply connected manifold then $X\times\R^n$ is integrally hyperspherical. If a un…

We prove the existence of infinitely many periodic points of symplectomorphisms isotopic to the identity if they admit at least one (non-contractible) hyperbolic periodic orbit and satisfy some condition on its flux. The obtained periodic points correspond to periodic orbits whose free homotopy classes are formed by it…

We prove exponential growth rate of contractible closed geodesics for an arbitrary bumpy metric on manifolds of the form X#Y, where the fundamental group of X has a subgroup of finite index at least 3 and Y is simply connected and not a homotopy sphere.

Study shows contractibility of certain metrics on 3-manifolds.

On a Riemannian or a semi-Riemannian manifold, the metric determines invariants like the Levi-Civita connection and the Riemann curvature. If the metric becomes degenerate (as in singular semi-Riemannian geometry), these constructions no longer work, because they are based on the inverse of the metric, and on related o…

New rigidity result for maps between curved spaces.

We implement a differential-geometric approach to normal forms for contracting measurable cocycles to $\mbox{Diff}^q({\bf R}^n, {\bf 0})$, $q \geq 2$. We obtain resonance polynomial normal forms for the contracting cocycle and its centralizer, via $C^q$ changes of coordinates. These are interpreted as nonstationary inv…