Homology and homotopy complexity in negative curvature

Linear upper bounds are provided for the size of the torsion homology of negatively curved manifolds of finite volume in all dimensions $d\ne 3$. This extends a classical theorem by Gromov. In dimension $3$, as opposed to the Betti numbers, the size of torsion homology is unbounded in terms of the volume. Moreover, there is a sequence of $3$-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds that converges to $\mathbb{H}^3$ in the Benjamini--Schramm topology while its normalized torsion in the first homology is dense in $[0,\infty]$. In dimension $d\geq 4$ a somewhat precise estimate is given for the number of negatively curved manifolds of finite volume, up to homotopy, and in dimension $d\ge 5$ up to homeomorphism. These results are based on an effective simplicial thick-thin decomposition which is of independent interest.