No Arabic abstract
We prove that rationally essential manifolds with suitably large fundamental groups do not admit any maps of non-zero degree from products of closed manifolds of positive dimension. Particular examples include all manifolds of non-positive sectional curvature of rank one and all irreducible locally symmetric spaces of non-compact type. For closed manifolds from certain classes, say non-positively curved ones, or certain surface bundles over surfaces, we show that they do admit maps of non-zero degree from non-trivial products if and only if they are virtually diffeomorphic to products.
We show that the identity component of the group of diffeomorphisms of a closed oriented surface of positive genus admits many unbounded quasi-morphisms. As a corollary, we also deduce that this group is not uniformly perfect and its fragmentation norm is unbounded, answering a question of Burago--Ivanov--Polterovich. As a key tool we construct a hyperbolic graph on which these groups act, which is the analog of the curve graph for the mapping class group.
We define a notion of semi-conjugacy between orientation-preserving actions of a group on the circle, which for fixed point free actions coincides with a classical definition of Ghys. We then show that two circle actions are semi-conjugate if and only if they have the same bounded Euler class. This settles some existing confusion present in the literature.
We prove that any arithmetic hyperbolic $n$-manifold of simplest type can either be geodesically embedded into an arithmetic hyperbolic $(n+1)$-manifold or its universal $mathrm{mod}~2$ Abelian cover can.
In this paper we consider convex co-compact subgroups of the projective linear group. We prove that such a group is relatively hyperbolic with respect to a collection of virtually Abelian subgroups of rank two if and only if each open face in the ideal boundary has dimension at most one. We also introduce the coarse Hilbert dimension of a subset of a convex set and use it to characterize when a naive convex co-compact subgroup is word hyperbolic or relatively hyperbolic with respect to a collection of virtually Abelian subgroups of rank two.
We exhibit a closed aspherical 5-manifold of nonpositive curvature that fibers over a circle whose fundamental group is hyperbolic relative to abelian subgroups such that the fiber is a closed aspherical 4-manifold whose fundamental group is not hyperbolic relative to abelian subgroups.