We show that closed aspherical manifolds supporting an affine structure, whose holonomy map is injective and contains a pure translation, must have vanishing simplicial volume. This provides some further evidence for the veracity of the Auslander Conjecture. Along the way, we provide a simple cohomological criterion for aspherical manifolds with normal amenable subgroups of $pi_1$ to have vanishing simplicial volume. This answers a special case of a question due to Luck.
We consider the relation between simplicial volume and two of its variants: the stable integral simplicial volume and the integral foliated simplicial volume. The definition of the latter depends on a choice of a measure preserving action of the fundamental group on a probability space. We show that integral foliated simplicial volume is monotone with respect to weak containment of measure preserving actions and yields upper bounds on (integral) homology growth. Using ergodic theory we prove that simplicial volume, integral foliated simplicial volume and stable integral simplicial volume coincide for closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds and closed aspherical manifolds with amenable residually finite fundamental group (being equal to zero in the latter case). However, we show that integral foliated simplicial volume and the classical simplicial volume do not coincide for hyperbolic manifolds of dimension at least 4.
Integral foliated simplicial volume is a version of simplicial volume combining the rigidity of integral coefficients with the flexibility of measure spaces. In this article, using the language of measure equivalence of groups we prove a proportionality principle for integral foliated simplicial volume for aspherical manifolds and give refined upper bounds of integral foliated simplicial volume in terms of stable integral simplicial volume. This allows us to compute the integral foliated simplicial volume of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. This is complemented by the calculation of the integral foliated simplicial volume of Seifert 3-manifolds.
Graph manifolds are manifolds that decompose along tori into pieces with a tame $S^1$-structure. In this paper, we prove that the simplicial volume of graph manifolds (which is known to be zero) can be approximated by integral simplicial volumes of their finite coverings. This gives a uniform proof of the vanishing of rank gradients, Betti number gradients and torsion homology gradients for graph manifolds.
Let n>2 and let M be an orientable complete finite volume hyperbolic n-manifold with (possibly empty) geodesic boundary having Riemannian volume vol(M) and simplicial volume ||M||. A celebrated result by Gromov and Thurston states that if M has empty boundary then the ratio between vol(M) and ||M|| is equal to v_n, where v_n is the volume of the regular ideal geodesic n-simplex in hyperbolic n-space. On the contrary, Jungreis and Kuessner proved that if the boundary of M is non-empty, then such a ratio is strictly less than v_n. We prove here that for every a>0 there exists k>0 (only depending on a and n) such that if the ratio between the volume of the boundary of M and the volume of M is less than k, then the ratio between vol(M) and ||M|| is greater than v_n-a. As a consequence we show that for every a>0 there exists a compact orientable hyperbolic n-manifold M with non-empty geodesic boundary such that the ratio between vol(M) and ||M|| is greater than v_n-a. Our argument also works in the case of empty boundary, thus providing a somewhat new proof of the proportionality principle for non-compact finite-volume hyperbolic n-manifolds without boundary.