Surgery obstruction of a normal map to a simple Poincare pair $(X,Y)$ lies in the relative surgery obstruction group $L_*(π_1(Y)\toπ_1(X))$. A well known result of Wall, the so called $π$-$π$ theorem, states that in higher dimensions a normal map of a manifold with boundary to a simple Poincare pair with $π_1(X)\congπ_1(Y)$ is normally bordant to a simple homotopy equivalence of pairs. In order to study normal maps to a manifold with a submanifold, Wall introduced surgery obstruction group for manifold pairs $LP_*$ and splitting obstruction groups $LS_*$. In the present paper we formulate and prove for manifold pairs with boundaries the results which are similar to the $π$-$π$ theorem. We give direct geometric proofs, which are based on the original statements of Wall's results and apply obtained results to investigate surgery on filtered manifolds.
The problem of splitting a homotopy equivalence along a submanifold is closely related to the surgery exact sequence and to the problem of surgery of manifold pairs. In classical surgery theory there exist two approaches to surgery in the category of manifolds with boundaries. In the $ rel \partial$ case the surgery on a manifold pair is considered with the given fixed manifold structure on the boundary. In the relative case the surgery on the manifold with boundary is considered without fixing maps on the boundary. Consider a normal map to a manifold pair $(Y, \partial Y)\subset (X, \partial …
We obtain a description of Poisson--Furstenberg boundaries for (random walks on) fundamental groups of compact graph-manifolds. Together with previously known results due to V.A. Kaimanovich and others, this allows one to obtain descriptions of Poisson--Furstenberg boundaries for fundamental groups of all closed 3-manifolds.
We provide, for hyperbolic and flat 3-manifolds, obstructions to bounding hyperbolic 4-manifolds, thus resolving in the negative a question of Farrell and Zdravkovska.
We show that trees of manifolds, the topological spaces introduced by Jakobsche, appear as boundaries at infinity of various spaces and groups. In particular, they appear as Gromov boundaries of some hyperbolic groups, of arbitrary dimension, obtained by the procedure of strict hyperbolization. We also recognize these spaces as boundaries of arbitrary Coxeter groups with manifold nerves, and as Gromov boundaries of the fundamental groups of singular spaces obtained from some finite volume hyperbolic manifolds by cutting off their cusps and collapsing the resulting boundary tori to points.
We find boundaries of Borel-Serre compactifications of locally symmetric spaces, for which any filling is incompressible. We prove this result by showing that these boundaries have small singular models and using these models to obstruct compressions. We also show that small singular models of boundaries obstruct $S^1$-actions (and more generally homotopically trivial $\mathbb Z/p$-actions) on interiors of aspherical fillings. We use this to bound the symmetry of complete Riemannian metrics on such interiors in terms of the fundamental group. We also use small singular models to simplify the p…
In this note, we prove that if the boundary of a Mazur-type $4$-manifold is an irreducible Heegaard Floer homology $L$-space, then the manifold must be the $4$-ball, and the boundary must be the $3$-sphere. We use this to give a new proof of Gabai's Property R.
We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact 3-manifold, or contact 3-manifolds with non-vanishing Heegaard Floer invariant, is the boundary of a simply connected 4-manifolds that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures each of which supports a symplectic structure with concave boundary, that is there are infinitely many exotic caps for any such contact manifold.
Building on work of Stolz, we prove for integers $0 \le d \le 3$ and $k>232$ that the boundaries of $(k-1)$-connected, almost closed $(2k+d)$-manifolds also bound parallelizable manifolds. Away from finitely many dimensions, this settles longstanding questions of C.T.C. Wall, determines all Stein fillable homotopy spheres, and proves a conjecture of Galatius and Randal-Williams. Implications are drawn for both the classification of highly connected manifolds and, via work of Kreck and Krannich, the calculation of their mapping class groups. Our technique is to recast the Galatius and Randal-Wi…
Motivated by the L-space conjecture, we investigate various notions of order-detection of slopes on knot manifolds. These notions are designed to characterise when rational homology 3-spheres obtained by gluing compact manifolds along torus boundary components have left-orderable fundamental groups and when a Dehn filling of a knot manifold has a left-orderable fundamental group. Our developments parallel existing results in the case of Heegaard-Floer slope detection and foliation slope detection, leading to several conjectured structure theorems that connect relative Heegaard-Floer homology a…
This survey/expository article covers a variety of topics related to the "topology at infinity" of noncompact manifolds and complexes. In manifold topology and geometric group theory, the most important noncompact spaces are often contractible, so distinguishing one from another requires techniques beyond the standard tools of algebraic topology. One approach uses end invariants, such as the number of ends or the fundamental group at infinity; another approach seeks nice compactifications, then analyzes the boundaries. A thread connecting the two is shape theory. In these notes we provide a ca…
We introduce a new topological invariant, which is a nonnegative integer, of compact manifolds with boundaries associated with a kind of decomposition of them. Let M and N be m-dimensional compact connected manifolds with boundaries. The new invariant of any boundary union of M and N is less than or equal to that of M (resp. that of N).
We study direct limits of embedded Cantor sets and embedded \sier curves. We show that under appropriate conditions on the embeddings, all limits of Cantor spaces give rise to homeomorphic spaces, called $ω$-Cantor spaces, and similarly, all limits of \sier curves give homeomorphic spaces, called to $ω$-\sier curves. We then show that the former occur naturally as Morse boundaries of right-angled Artin groups and fundamental groups of non-geometric graph manifolds, while the latter occur as Morse boundaries of fundamental groups of finite-volume, cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds.
In all known examples of a CAT(0) group acting on CAT(0) spaces with non-homeomorphic CAT(0) visual boundaries, the boundaries are each not path connected. In this paper, we show this does not have to be the case by providing examples of right-angled Artin groups which exhibit non-unique CAT(0) boundaries where all of the boundaries are arbitrarily connected. We also prove a combination theorem for certain amalgams of CAT(0) groups to act on spaces with non-path connected visual boundaries. We apply this theorem to some right-angled Artin groups.
We generalize Bestvina's notion of a $\mathcal{Z}$-boundary for a group to that of a "coarse $\mathcal{Z}$-boundary." We show that established theorems about $\mathcal{Z}$-boundaries carry over nicely to the more general theory, and that some wished-for properties of $\mathcal{Z}$-boundaries become theorems when applied to coarse $\mathcal{Z}$-boundaries. Most notably, the property of admitting a coarse $\mathcal{Z}$-boundary is a pure quasi-isometry invariant. In the process, we streamline both new and existing definitions by introducing the notion of a "model $\mathcal{Z}$-geometry." In acco…
Here we study two interesting smooth contractible manifolds, whose boundaries have non-trivial mapping class groups. The first one is a non-Stein contractible manifold, such that every self diffeomorphism of its boundary extends inside; implying that this manifold can not be a loose cork. The second example is a Stein contractible manifold which is a cork, with an interesting cork automorphism $f:\partial W \to \partial W$. By \cite{am} we know that any homotopy $4$-sphere is obtained gluing together two contractible Stein manifolds along their common boundaries by a diffeomorphism. We use the…
In this paper we prove a theorem describing the local topology of the boundary of a hyperbolic group in terms of its global topology: the boundary is locally simply connected if and only if the complement of any point in the boundary is simply connected. This generalises a theorem of Bestvina and Mess.
The purpose of the present paper is to prove existence of super-exponentially many compact orientable hyperbolic arithmetic $n$-manifolds that are geometric boundaries of compact orientable hyperbolic $(n+1)$-manifolds, for any $n \geq 2$, thereby establishing that these classes of manifolds have the same growth rate with respect to volume as all compact orientable hyperbolic arithmetic $n$-manifolds. An analogous result holds for non-compact orientable hyperbolic arithmetic $n$-manifolds of finite volume that are geometric boundaries, for $n \geq 2$.
We prove the existence of Cannon-Thurston maps for Kleinian groups corresponding to pared manifolds whose boundary is incompressible away from cusps. We also describe the structure of these maps in terms of ending laminations.
Tukia and Vaisala showed that every quasi-conformal map of $\R^n$ extends to a quasi-conformal self-map of $\R^{n+1}$. The restriction of the extended map to the upper half-space $\R^n \times \R^+$ is, in fact, bi-Lipschitz with respect to the hyperbolic metric. More generally, every homogeneous negatively curved manifold decomposes as $M = N \rtimes \R^+$ where $N$ is a nilpotent group with a metric on which $\R^+$ acts by dilations. We show that under some assumptions on $N$, every quasi-symmetry of $N$ extends to a bi-Lipschitz map of $M$. The result applies to a wide class of manifolds $M$…
Let $X$ be a nonelementary CAT(0) cubical complex. We prove that if $X$ is essential and irreducible, then the contact graph of $X$ (introduced in \cite{Hagen}) is unbounded and its boundary is homeomorphic to the regular boundary of $X$ (defined in \cite{Fernos}, \cite{KarSageev}). Using this, we reformulate the Caprace-Sageev's Rank-Rigidity Theorem in terms of the action on the contact graph. Let $G$ be a group with a nonelementary action on $X$, and $(Z_n)$ a random walk corresponding to a generating probability measure on $G$ with finite second moment. Using this identification of the bou…
