This paper grew out of an attempt to find a suitable finite sheeted covering of an aspherical 3-manifold so that the cover either has infinite or trivial first homology group. With this motivation we define a new class of groups. These groups are in some sense eventually perfect. We prove results giving several classes of examples of groups which do (not) belong to this class. Also we prove some elementary results on these groups and state two conjectures. A direct application of one of the conjectures to the virtual Betti number conjecture of Thurston is mentioned.
We show that any homomorphism from the homeomorphism group of a compact 2-manifold, with the compact-open topology, or equivalently, with the topology of uniform convergence, into a separable topological group is automatically continuous.
This is a survey of topological properties of open, complete nonpositively curved manifolds which may have infinite volume. Topics include topology of ends, restrictions on the fundamental group, as well as a review of known examples.
We prove that the deformation space $AH(M)$ of marked hyperbolic 3-manifolds homotopy equivalent to a fixed compact 3-manifold $M$ with incompressible boundary is locally connected at quasiconformally rigid points.
We give two applications of the 2-Engel relation, classically studied in finite and Lie groups, to the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture. The A-B slice problem, a reformulation of the surgery conjecture for free groups, is shown to admit a homotopy solution. We also exhibit a new collection of universal surgery problems, defined using ramifications of homotopically trivial links. More generally we show how n-Engel relations arise from higher order double points of surfaces in 4-space.
We survey work on the topology of the space AH(M) of all (marked) hyperbolic 3-manifolds homotopy equivalent to a fixed compact 3-manifold M with boundary. The interior of AH(M) is quite well-understood, but the topology of the entire space can be quite complicated. However, the topology is well-behaved at many points in the boundary of AH(M).
We investigate relation between Dehn fillings and commensurability of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. The set consisting of the commensurability classes of hyperbolic 3-manifolds admits the quotient topology induced by the geometric topology. We show that this quotient space satisfies some separation axioms. Roughly speaking, this means that commensurablity classes are sparsely distributed in the space consisting of the hyperbolic 3-manifolds.
Let $M$ be a closed, oriented and smooth manifold of dimension $d$. Let $ŁM$ be the space of smooth loops in $M$. Chas and Sullivan introduced loop product, a product of degree $-d$ on the homology of $LM$. In this paper we show how for three manifolds the ``nontriviality'' of the loop product relates to the ``hyperbolicity'' of the underlying manifold. This is an application of the existing powerful tool and results in three dimensional topology such as the prime decomposition, torus decomposition, Seifert theorem, torus theorem.
This article analyzes the interplay between symplectic geometry in dimension four and the invariants for smooth four-manifolds constructed using holomorphic triangles introduced in math.SG/0110169. Specifically, we establish a non-vanishing result for the invariants of symplectic four-manifolds, which leads to new proofs of the indecomposability theorem for symplectic four-manifolds and the symplectic Thom conjecture. As a new application, we generalize the indecomposability theorem to splittings of four-manifolds along a certain class of three-manifolds obtained by plumbings of spheres. This …
We study geometry, topology and deformation spaces of noncompact complex hyperbolic manifolds (geometrically finite, with variable negative curvature), whose properties make them surprisingly different from real hyperbolic manifolds with constant negative curvature. This study uses an interaction between Kähler geometry of the complex hyperbolic space and the contact structure at its infinity (the one-point compactification of the Heisenberg group), in particular an established structural theorem for discrete group actions on nilpotent Lie groups.
In the third part of this series of papers, we establish several topological results that will become important for studying the long-time behavior of Ricci flows with surgery. In the first part of this paper we recall some elementary observations in the topology of 3-manifolds. The main part is devoted to the construction of certain simplicial complexes in a given 3-manifold that exhibit useful intersection properties with embedded, incompressible solid tori. This paper is purely topological in nature and Ricci flows will not be used.
We present a new, more elementary proof of the Freedman-Teichner result that the geometric classification techniques (surgery, s-cobordism, and pseudoisotopy) hold for topological 4-manifolds with groups of subexponential growth. In an appendix Freedman and Teichner give a correction to their original proof, and reformulate the growth estimates in terms of coarse geometry.
This is an expository note intended to illustrate current research in topological study of partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms in dimension 3 with a beautiful result due to Margulis and Plante-Thurston on topological obstructions for a manifold to admit an Anosov flow.
We prove that the deformation space AH(M) of marked hyperbolic 3-manifolds homotopy equivalent to a fixed compact 3-manifold M with incompressible boundary is locally connected at minimally parabolic points. Moreover, spaces of Kleinian surface groups are locally connected at quasiconformally rigid points. Similar results are obtained for deformation spaces of acylindrical 3-manifolds and Bers slices.
Topological 4-dimensional surgery is conjectured to fail, in general, for free fundamental groups. M. Freedman and P. Teichner have shown that surgery problems with an arbitrary fundamental group have a solution, provided they satisfy a certain condition on Dwyer's filtration on second homology. We give a new geometric proof of this result, and analyze its relation to the canonical surgery problems.
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 construct a functor from the smooth 4-dimensional manifolds to the hyper-algebraic number fields, i.e. fields with non-commutative multiplication. It is proved that that the simply connected 4-manifolds correspond to the abelian extensions. We recover the Rokhlin and Donaldson's Theorems from the Galois theory of the non-commutative fields.
This article is the author's contribution to the volume "Problems on mapping class groups and related topics" which will be published in December 2006, with Benson Farb as Editor. Various individuals were invited by Farb to submit open problems which seemed interesting to them about surface mapping class groups. We singled out a particular recent development, Hempel's concept of the `Heegaard distance' of an element in the mapping class group, and used it to describe a number of open questions which relate to the correspondence between Heegaard surfaces in 3-manifolds and the mapping class gro…
This article presents a new and more elementary proof of the main Seiberg-Witten-based obstruction to the existence of Einstein metrics on smooth compact 4-manifolds. It also introduces a new smooth manifold invariant which conveniently encapsulates those aspects of Seiberg-Witten theory most relevant to the study of Riemannian variational problems on 4-manifolds.
This paper concerns the topology of isospectral real manifolds of certain Jacobi elements associated with real split semisimple Lie algebras. The manifolds are related to the compactified level sets of the generalized (nonperiodic) Toda lattice equations defined on the semisimple Lie algebras. We then give a cellular decomposition and the associated chain complex of the manifold by introducing colored Dynkin diagrams which parametrize the cells in the decomposition. We also discuss the Morse chain complex of the manifold.
A smooth five-dimensional s-cobordism becomes a smooth product if stabilized by a finite number n of $S^2xS^2x[0,1]$'s. We show that for amenable fundamental groups, the minimal n is subextensive in covers, i.e., n(cover)/index(cover) has limit 0. We focus on the notion of sweepout width, which is a bridge between 4-dimensional topology and coarse geometry.
Let M be a 4-manifold with residually finite fundamental group G having b_1(G) > 0. Assume that M carries a symplectic structure with trivial canonical class K = 0 in H^2(M). Using a theorem of Bauer and Li, together with some classical results in 4-manifold topology, we show that for a large class of groups $ is determined up to homotopy and, in favorable circumstances, up to homeomorphism by its fundamental group. This is analogous to what was proven by Morgan-Szabo in the case of b_1 = 0 and provides further evidence to the conjectural classification of symplectic 4-manifolds with K = 0$. A…
We prove that closed manifolds admitting a generic metric whose sectional curvature is locally quasi-constant are graphs of space forms. In the more general setting of QC spaces where sets of isotropic points are arbitrary, under suitable positivity assumption and for torsion-free fundamental groups they are still diffeomorphic to connected sums of spherical space forms and spherical bundles over the circle.
We show that there exist smooth, simply connected, four-dimensional spin manifolds which do not admit Einstein metrics, but nonetheless satisfy the strict Hitchin-Thorpe inequality. Our construction makes use of the Bauer/Furuta cohomotopy refinement of the Seiberg-Witten invariant, in conjunction with curvature estimates previously proved by the second author. These methods also easily allow one to construct examples of topological 4-manifolds which admit an Einstein metric for one smooth structure, but which have infinitely many other smooth structures for which no Einstein metric can exist.
We show a rigidity theorem for the Seiberg-Witten invariants mod 2 for families of spin 4-manifolds. A mechanism of this rigidity theorem also gives a family version of 10/8-type inequality. As an application, we prove the existence of non-smoothable topological families of 4-manifolds whose fiber, base space, and total space are smoothable as manifolds. These non-smoothable topological families provide new examples of 4-manifolds $M$ for which the inclusion maps $\operatorname{Diff}(M) \hookrightarrow \operatorname{Homeo}(M)$ are not weak homotopy equivalences. We shall also give a new series…
Let C be some class of objects equipped with a set of simplifying moves. When we apply these to a given object M in C as long as possible, we get a root of M. Our main result is that under certain conditions the root of any object exists and is unique. We apply this result to different situations and get several new results and new proofs of known results. Among them there are a new proof of the Kneser-Milnor prime decomposition theorem for 3-manifolds and different versions of this theorem for cobordisms, knotted graphs, and orbifolds.
This paper introduces two-dimensional diagrams that are slight generalizations of moment map images for toric four-manifolds and catalogs techniques for reading topological and symplectic properties of a symplectic four-manifold from these diagrams. The paper offers a purely topological approach to toric manifolds as well as methods for visualizing other manifolds, including the K3 surface, and for visualizing certain surgeries. Most of the techniques extend to higher dimensions.
We give a bordism-theoretic characterisation of those closed almost contact (2q+1)-manifolds (with q > 2) which admit a Stein fillable contact structure. Our method is to apply Eliashberg's h-principle for Stein manifolds in the setting of Kreck's modified surgery. As an application, we show that any simply connected almost contact 7-manifold with torsion free second homotopy group is Stein fillable. We also discuss the Stein fillability of exotic spheres and examine subcritical Stein fillability.
We carry out the harmonic analysis on four Platonic spherical three-manifolds with different topologies. Starting out from the homotopies (Everitt 2004), we convert them into deck operations, acting on the simply connected three-sphere as the cover, and obtain the corresponding variety of deck groups. For each topology, the three-sphere is tiled into copies of a fundamental domain under the corresponding deck group. We employ the point symmetry of each Platonic manifold to construct its fundamental domain as a spherical orbifold. While the three-sphere supports an~orthonormal complete basis fo…
Let M be a compact 3-manifold whose interior admits a complete hyperbolic structure. We let Lambda(M) be the supremum of the bottom eigenvalue of the Laplacian of N, where N varies over all hyperbolic 3-manifolds homeomorphic to the interior of M. Similarly, we let D(M) be the infimum of the Hausdorff dimensions of limit sets of Kleinian groups whose quotients are homeomorphic to the interior of M. We observe that Lambda(M)=D(M)(2-D(M)) if M is not handlebody or a thickened torus. We characterize exactly when Lambda(M)=1 and D(M)=1 in terms of the characteristic submanifold of the incompressib…
Let $P$ be a simple polytope of dimension $n$ with $m$ facets and $P_{v}$ be a polytope obtained from $P$ by cutting off one vertex $v$. Let $Z=Z(P)$ and $Z_{v}=Z(P_{v})$ be the corresponding moment-angle manifolds. In \cite{[GL]} S.Gitler and S.López conjectured that: $Z_{v}$ is diffeomorphic to $\partial[(Z-int(D^{n+m}))\times D^{2}]\sharp \mathop{\sharp} \limits_{j=1}^{m-n} \binom{m-n}{j} (S^{j+2}\times S^{m+n-j-1})$, and they have proved the conjecture in the case $m<3n$. In this paper we prove the conjecture in general case.
For a topological space $X$ we study continuous maps $f : X\to \mathbb R^m$ such that images of every pairwise distinct $k$ points are affinely (linearly) independent. Such maps are called affinely (linearly) $k$-regular embeddings. We investigate the cohomology obstructions to existence of regular embeddings and give some new lower bounds on the dimension $m$ as function of $X$ and $k$, for the cases $X$ is $\mathbb R^n$ or $X$ is an $n$-dimensional manifold. In the latter case, some nonzero Stiefel--Whitney classes of $X$ help to improve the bound.
A conjecture of Kotschick predicts that a compact Kähler manifold $X$ fibres smoothly over the circle if and only if it admits a holomorphic one-form without zeros. In this paper we develop an approach to this conjecture and verify it in dimension two. In a joint paper with Hao, we use our approach to prove Kotschick's conjecture for smooth projective threefolds.
A group-theoretic framework for low-dimensional topology
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；Heinrich-Heine-Universität（杜塞尔多夫海因里希·海涅大学）
In this survey, we give an overview of Brieskorn manifolds and varieties, and their role in contact topology. We discuss open books, fillings and invariants such as contact and symplectic homology. We also present some new results involving exotic contact structures, invariants and orderability. The main tool for the required computations is a version of the Morse-Bott spectral sequence. We provide a proof for the particular version that is useful for us.
We provide obstructions to the existence of conformally Anosov Reeb flows on a 3-manifold that partially generalize similar obstructions to Anosov Reeb flows. In particular, we show $\mathbb{S}^3$ does not admit conformally Anosov Reeb flows. We also give a Riemannian geometric condition on a metric compatible with a contact structure implying that a Reeb field is Anosov. From this we can give curvature conditions on a metric compatible with a contact structure that implies universal tightness of the contact structure among other things.
The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified handlebody and monodromy representations for a certain subclass of broken Lefschetz fibrations/pencils, while showing that all near-symplectic closed 4-manifolds can be supported by these a la Auroux, Donaldson, Katzarkov. Various constructions of broken Lefschetz fibrations and a generalization of the symplectic fiber sum operation to the near-symplectic se…
Let $M$ be a simply-connected closed manifold of dimension $\geq 5$ which does not admit a metric with positive scalar curvature. We give necessary conditions for $M$ to admit a scalar-flat metric. These conditions involve the first Pontrjagin class and the cohomology ring of $M$. As a consequence any simply-connected scalar-flat manifold of dimension $\geq 5$ with vanishing first Pontrjagin class admits a metric with positive scalar curvature. We also describe some relations between scalar-flat metrics, almost complex structures and the free loop space.
Let N be a compact, orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold with connected, totally geodesic boundary of genus 2. If N has Heegaard genus at least 5, then its volume is greater than 6.89. The proof of this result uses the following dichotomy: either N has a long return path (defined by Kojima-Miyamoto), or N has an embedded, codimension-0 submanifold X with incompressible boundary $T \sqcup \partial N$, where T is the frontier of X in N, which is not a book of I-bundles. As an application of this result, we show that if M is a closed, orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold such that H_1(M;Z_2) has dimensio…
Contact structures on 3-manifolds are analyzed by decomposing the manifold along convex surfaces. Background results of Giroux, Eliashberg, Colin, and Honda are discussed with an emphasis on examples. Convex decompositions are then used to give a new proof of the Gabai-Eliashberg-Thurston Theorem on the existence of universally tight contact structures and also to study the contact topology of a space in the presence or absence of tori. Classification of tight contact structures on fibred manifolds and related open questions are also discussed. This paper is based on a series of talks given at…
We give a purely topological definition of the perturbative quantum invariants of links and 3-manifolds associated with Chern-Simons field theory. Our definition is as close as possible to one given by Kontsevich. We will also establish some basic properties of these invariants, in particular that they are universally finite type with respect to algebraically split surgery and with respect to Torelli surgery. Torelli surgery is a mutual generalization of blink surgery of Garoufalidis and Levine and clasper surgery of Habiro.
We investigate small covers and quasitoric over the duals of neighborly simplicial polytopes with small number of vertices in dimensions $4$, $5$, $6$ and $7$. In the most of the considered cases we obtain the complete classification of small covers. The lifting conjecture in all cases is verified to be true. The problem of cohomological rigidity for small covers is also studied and we have found a whole new series of weakly cohomologically rigid simple polytopes. New examples of manifolds provide the first known examples of quasitoric manifolds in higher dimensions whose orbit polytopes have …
In this paper we show that a simply connected 8-dimensional manifold M of positive sectional curvature and symmetry rank $\geq 2$ resembles a rank one symmetric space in several ways. For example, the Euler characteristic of M is equal to the Euler characteristic of S^8, H P^2 or C P^4. And if M is rationally elliptic then M is rationally isomorphic to a rank one symmetric space. For torsion-free manifolds we derive a much stronger classification. We also study the bordism type of 8-dimensional manifolds of positive sectional curvature and symmetry rank $\geq 2$. As an illustration we apply ou…
This book provides a self-contained introduction to the topology and geometry of surfaces and three-manifolds. The main goal is to describe Thurston's geometrisation of three-manifolds, proved by Perelman in 2002. The book is divided into three parts: the first is devoted to hyperbolic geometry, the second to surfaces, and the third to three-manifolds. It contains complete proofs of Mostow's rigidity, the thick-thin decomposition, Thurston's classification of the diffeomorphisms of surfaces (via Bonahon's geodesic currents), the prime and JSJ decomposition, the topological and geometric classi…
This paper investigates the question of which smooth compact 4-manifolds admit Riemannian metrics that minimize the L2-norm of the curvature tensor. Metrics with this property are called OPTIMAL; Einstein metrics and scalar-flat anti-self-dual metrics provide us with two interesting classes of examples. Using twistor methods, optimal metrics of the second type are constructed on the connected sums kCP_2 for k > 5. However, related constructions also show that large classes of simply connected 4-manifolds do not admit any optimal metrics at all. Interestingly, the difference between existence a…
We construct a functor which maps conjugate pseudo-Anosov automorphisms of a surface to the so-called stably isomorphic stationary AF-algebras; the functor gives new topological invariants of three dimensional manifolds coming from the known invariants of the AF-algebras. The main invariant is a triple (L, [I], K), where L is an integral order in the real number field K and [I] the equivalence class of ideals in L.
We initiate a study of positive multisections of Lefschetz fibrations via positive factorizations in framed mapping class groups of surfaces. Using our methods, one can effectively capture various interesting symplectic surfaces in symplectic 4-manifolds as multisections, such as Seiberg-Witten basic classes and exceptional classes, or branched loci of compact Stein surfaces as branched coverings of the 4-ball. Various problems regarding the topology of symplectic 4-manifolds, such as the smooth classification of symplectic Calabi-Yau 4-manifolds, can be translated to combinatorial problems in…
