Aspherical manifolds, Mellin transformation and a question of Bobadilla–Kollár

In their paper from 2012, Bobadilla and Kollár studied topological conditions which guarantee that a proper map of complex algebraic varieties is a topological or differentiable fibration. They also asked whether a certain finiteness property on the relative covering space can imply that a proper map is a fibration. In this paper, we answer positively the integral homology version of their question in the case of abelian varieties, and the rational homology version in the case of compact ball quotients. We also propose several conjectures in relation to the Singer–Hopf conjecture in the complex projective setting.

Integral foliated simplicial volume and S 1-actions

The simplicial volume of oriented closed connected smooth manifolds that admit a non-trivial smooth S 1 {S^{1}} -action vanishes. In the present work, we prove a version of this result for the integral foliated simplicial volume of aspherical manifolds: The integral foliated simplicial volume of aspherical oriented closed connected smooth manifolds that admit a non-trivial smooth S 1 {S^{1}} -action vanishes. Our proof uses the geometric construction of Yano’s proof for ordinary simplicial volume as well as the parametrized uniform boundary condition for S 1 {S^{1}} .

Anosov diffeomorphisms of products I. Negative curvature and rational homology spheres

We show that various classes of products of manifolds do not support transitive Anosov diffeomorphisms. Exploiting the Ruelle–Sullivan cohomology class, we prove that the product of a negatively curved manifold with a rational homology sphere does not support transitive Anosov diffeomorphisms. We extend this result to products of finitely many negatively curved manifolds of dimension at least three with a rational homology sphere that has vanishing simplicial volume. As an application of this study, we obtain new examples of manifolds that do not support transitive Anosov diffeomorphisms, including certain manifolds with non-trivial higher homotopy groups and certain products of aspherical manifolds.

Embeddings of free groups into asymptotic cones of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms

Given a symplectic surface [Formula: see text] of genus [Formula: see text], we show that the free group with two generators embeds into every asymptotic cone of [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the Hofer metric. The result stabilizes to products with symplectically aspherical manifolds.

Hyperbolic groups with boundary an n-dimensional Sierpinski space

For [Formula: see text], we show that if [Formula: see text] is a torsion-free hyperbolic group whose visual boundary [Formula: see text] is an [Formula: see text]-dimensional Sierpinski space, then [Formula: see text] for some aspherical [Formula: see text]-manifold [Formula: see text] with non-empty boundary. Concerning the converse, we construct, for each [Formula: see text], examples of aspherical manifolds with boundary, whose fundamental group [Formula: see text] is hyperbolic, but with visual boundary [Formula: see text] not homeomorphic to [Formula: see text]. Our examples even support (metric) negative curvature, and have totally geodesic boundary.