Related papers: Diffeomorphisms and positive curvature

In my talk I will discuss the following results which were obtained in joint work with Wilderich Tuschmann. 1. For any given numbers $m$, $C$ and $D$, the class of $m$-dimensional simply connected closed smooth manifolds with finite second…

We show that in each dimension $n\ge 10$ there exist infinite sequences of homotopy equivalent but mutually non-homeomorphic closed simply connected Riemannian $n$-manifolds with $0\le \sec\le 1$, positive Ricci curvature and uniformly…

We show that the moduli space of Riemannian metrics of nonnegative sectional curvature on certain quotients of Brieskorn varieties in dimension 5 has infinitely many path components. The same is true for the corresponding moduli space of…

We extend a positive Ricci curvature gluing theorem of Perelman to a range of positive intermediate curvature conditions, ranging from positive scalar curvature up to (and including) positive sectional curvature. As an application of this,…

We investigate the curvature of invariant metrics on G-manifolds with finitely many non-principal orbits. We prove existence results for metrics of positive Ricci curvature and non-negative sectional curvature, and discuss some families of…

We show that mapping class groups of surfaces of genus at least two contain elements of infinite order that are not conjugate to their inverses, but whose powers have bounded torsion lengths. In particular every homogeneous…

We prove that in dimensions not equal to 4, 5, or 7, the homology and homotopy groups of the classifying space of the topological group of diffeomorphisms of a disk fixing the boundary are finitely generated in each degree. The proof uses…

We prove a finiteness theorem for the class of complete finite volume Riemannian manifolds with pinched negative sectional curvature, fixed fundamental group, and of dimension $>2$. One of the key ingredients is that the fundamental group…

For a compact smooth manifold $M$ (with boundary) we prove that the topological rank of the diffeomorphism group Diff$_0^k(M)$ is finite for all $k\geq 1$. This extends a result from [2] where the same claim is proved in the special case of…

Let the Ricci curvature of a compact Riemannian manifold be greater, at every point, than the Lie derivative of the metric with respect to some fixed smooth vector field. It is shown that the fundamental group then has only finitely many…

A gap in the proof of the main result in reference [1] in our original submission propagated into the constructions presented in the first version of our manuscript. In this version we give an alternative proof for the existence of…

We study families of diffeomorphisms detected by trivalent graphs via the Kontsevich classes. We specify some recent results and constructions of the second named author to show that those non-trivial elements in homotopy groups…

The main theorem shows that if M is an irreducible compact connected orientable 3-manifold with non-empty boundary, then the classifying space BDiff(M rel dM) of the space of diffeomorphisms of M which restrict to the identity map on…

In this paper we prove that the space $\cM(n,\rv,D,\Lambda):=\{(M^n,g) \text{ closed }: ~~\Ric\ge -(n-1),~\Vol(M)\ge \rv>0, \diam(M)\le D \text{ and } \int_{M}|\Rm|^{n/2}\le \Lambda\}$ has at most $C(n,\rv,D,\Lambda)$ many diffeomorphism…

In this survey article, given a smooth closed manifold M we study the space of Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature on M. A long-standing question is: when is this space non-empty (i.e. when does M admit a metric of positive…

By using cobordism theoretic arguments similar to those in the literature on positive scalar curvature metrics we prove the existence of contact structures on 5-dimensional spin manifolds whose fundamental group is a group of odd order (not…

In every odd dimension $n\geq 5$ we exhibit large classes of closed $n$-dimensional manifolds which admit infinitely many different geometries of positive Ricci curvature, i.e., manifolds for which their moduli space of metrics of positive…

In this paper we study manifolds, $X_{\Sigma}$, with fibred singularities, more specifically, a relevant space ${\mathcal R}^{\rm psc}(X_{\Sigma})$ of Riemannian metrics with positive scalar curvature. Our main goal is to prove that the…

Spaces with positive weights are those whose rational homotopy type admits a large family of "rescaling" automorphisms. We show that finite complexes with positive weights have many genuine self-maps. We also fix the proofs of some previous…

We study the fundamental group of an open $n$-manifold $M$ of nonnegative Ricci curvature with additional stability condition on $\widetilde{M}$, the Riemannian universal cover of $M$. We prove that if any tangent cone of $\widetilde{M}$ at…