An assortment of negatively curved ends

Motivated by a recent groundbreaking work of Ontaneda, we describe a sizable class of closed manifolds such that the product of each manifold in the class with the real line admits a complete metric of bounded negative sectional curvature which is an exponentially warped near one end and has finite volume near the other end.

Open aspherical manifolds not covered by the Euclidean space

We show that any open aspherical manifold of dimension n>3 is tangentially homotopy equivalent to an n-manifold whose universal cover is not homeomorphic to the Euclidean space.

Rigidity and relative hyperbolicity of real hyperbolic hyperplane complements

For n>3 we study spaces obtained from finite volume complete real hyperbolic n-manifolds by removing a compact totally geodesic submanifold of codimension two. We prove that their fundamental groups are relative hyperbolic, co-Hopf, biautomatic, residually hyperbolic, not Kahler, not isomorphic to lattices in virtually connected real Lie groups, have no nontrivial subgroups with property (T), have finite outer automorphism groups, satisfy Mostow-type Rigidity, have finite asymptotic dimension and rapid decay property, and satisfy Baum-Connes conjecture. We also characterize those lattices in real Lie groups that are isomorphic to relatively hyperbolic groups.