English

A 4-dimensional pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism

Geometric Topology 2025-11-14 v1 Differential Geometry Dynamical Systems

Abstract

We know from previous work with Italiano and Migliorini that there exists some hyperbolic 5-manifold that fibers over the circle. Here we build one example where the monodromy is a "pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism" of the 4-dimensional fiber, in a way that is surprisingly similar to the familiar and beautiful two-dimensional picture of Nielsen and Thurston for surfaces. This fact has various consequences: (1) There is a compact smooth 4-manifold MM such that no non-trivial class in H2(M)H_2(M) is represented by immersed tori, and infinitely many classes are represented by smoothly embedded genus two surfaces. (2) There is a compact locally CAT(0) space YY such that π1(Y)\pi_1(Y) is not hyperbolic and does not contain Z×Z\mathbb Z \times \mathbb Z. The latter answers a question of Gromov, known as the Closing Flat Problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.10530,
  title  = {A 4-dimensional pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism},
  author = {Bruno Martelli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.10530},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

77 pages, 27 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:36:12.263Z