Related papers: Free and fragmenting filling length

Filling length measures the length of the contracting closed loops in a null-homotopy. The filling length function of Gromov for a finitely presented group measures the filling length as a function of length of edge-loops in the Cayley…

Filling functions are asymptotic invariants of finitely presentable groups; the seminal work on the subject is by M.Gromov. They record features of combinatorial homotopy discs (van Kampen diagrams) filling loops in Cayley 2-complexes.…

Each element of the commutator subgroup of a group can be represented as a product of commutators. The minimal number of factors in such a product is called the commutator length of the element. The commutator length of a group is defined…

How hard is it to fill a loop in a Cayley graph with an unoriented surface? Following a comment of Gromov in "Asymptotic invariants of infinite groups", we define homological filling functions of groups with coefficients in a group $R$. Our…

This note describes some recent results about the homotopy properties of Hamiltonian loops in various manifolds, including toric manifolds and one point blow ups. We describe conditions under which a circle action does not contract in the…

Ends and end cohomology are powerful invariants for the study of noncompact spaces. We present a self-contained exposition of the topological theory of ends and prove novel extensions including the existence of an exhaustion of a proper…

Consider a finite connected $2$-complex $X$ endowed with a piecewise Riemannian metric and whose fundamental group is freely indecomposable, of rank at least $3$, and in which every $2$-generated subgroup is free. In this paper we show that…

Given a principal bundle with a connection, we look for an asymptotic expansion of the holonomy of a loop in terms of its length. This length is defined relative to some Riemannian or sub-Riemannian structure. We are able to give an…

We obtain a topological interpretation for the space of $L^2$ harmonic forms for some complete Riemannian manifold : when the geometry at infinity is the geometry of a simply connected nilpotent Lie group, when the geometry at infinity is a…

We show that whether loops can be shortcut in a group's Cayley graph depends on the choice of finite generating set. Our example is the direct product of two rank-2 free groups and a consequence is that this group has asymptotic cones with…

This paper concerns complete noncompact manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature. Roughly, we say that M has the loops to infinity property if given any noncontractible closed curve, C, and given any compact set, K, there exists a closed…

A well-known conjecture of Alspach says that every $2k$-regular Cayley graph of an abelian group can be decomposed into Hamiltonian cycles. We consider an analogous question for infinite abelian groups. In this setting one natural analogue…

It is proved that the sum of the Loewy lengths of the homology modules of a finite free complex F over a local ring R is bounded below by a number depending only on R. This result uncovers, in the structure of modules of finite projective…

We study various covering spectra for complete noncompact length spaces with universal covers (including Riemannian manifolds and the pointed Gromov Hausdorff limits of Riemannian manifolds with lower bounds on their Ricci curvature). We…

In this paper we study the minimal and maximal $L^{2}$-cohomology of oriented, possibly not complete, Riemannian manifolds. Our focus will be on both the reduced and the unreduced $L^{2}$-cohomology groups. In particular we will prove that…

Let $\Gamma$ be a finite group acting on a Lie group $G$. We consider a class of group extensions $1 \to G \to \hat{G} \to \Gamma \to 1$ defined by this action and a $2$-cocycle of $\Gamma$ with values in the centre of $G$. We establish and…

A smooth, compact 4-manifold with a Riemannian metric and b^(2+) > 0 has a non-trivial, closed, self-dual 2-form. If the metric is generic, then the zero set of this form is a disjoint union of circles. On the complement of this zero set,…

Let L\subset V=\bR^{k,l} be a maximally isotropic subspace. It is shown that any simply connected Lie group with a bi-invariant flat pseudo-Riemannian metric of signature (k,l) is 2-step nilpotent and is defined by an element \eta \in…

We introduce the notion of asymptotically finitely generated contact structures, which states essentially that the Symplectic Homology in a certain degree of any filling of such contact manifolds is uniformly generated by only finitely many…

We give a criterion for bounding the homological finiteness length of certain HF-groups. This is used in two distinct contexts. Firstly, the homological finiteness length of a non-uniform lattice on a locally finite n-dimensional…