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Euler characteristic of closed hyperbolic 4-manifolds.

By the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the volume of a hyperbolic 4-manifold is proportional to its Euler characteristic. There are examples, constructed explicitly in

Ratcliffe, John G.; Tschantz, Steven T. The volume spectrum of hyperbolic 4-manifolds. Experiment. Math. 9 (2000), no. 1, 101—125.

of hyperbolic 4-manifolds with every positive integer as their Euler characteristic. These examples are non-compact (with five or six cusps, I believe). But

Ratcliffe, John G. The geometry of hyperbolic manifolds of dimension at least 4. Non-Euclidean geometries, 269—286, Math. Appl. (N. Y.), 581, Springer, New York, 2006.

observes that there are restrictions on the Euler characteristic that a closed hyperbolic 4-manifold may possess. In particular, it is shown in

Chern, Shiing-shen On curvature and characteristic classes of a Riemann manifold. Abh. Math. Sem. Univ. Hamburg 20 (1955), 117—126.

that the Pontrjagin numbers of a hyperbolic manifold M vanish. But the signature \sigma(M) is a rational linear combination of those Pontrjagin numbers, so \sigma(M) = 0. And by Poincare duality, \chi(M) \equiv \sigma(M) \pmod 2, so \chi(M) is even. A natural question to ask is: does there exist a hyperbolic 4-manifold M with \chi(M) = 2? Now if such an M also had H_1(M) \neq 0, we would know the volume spectrum of closed hyperbolic 4-manifolds.

This certainly seems to parallel the case for 2-manifolds: all negative integers are the Euler characteristic of a hyperbolic 2-manifold, and all even negative integers are the Euler characteristic of a closed hyperbolic 2-manifold.

The vanishing of Pontrjagin numbers for hyperbolic manifolds also holds for pinched negative curvature under some conditions:

Ratcliffe, John G.; Tschantz, Steven T. The volume spectrum of hyperbolic 4-manifolds. Experiment. Math. 9 (2000), no. 1, 101—125.

It is also a fact that the Stiefel-Whitney numbers vanish for a closed hyperbolic manifold (and the vanishing of the top Stiefel-Whitney class is the same thing as having even Euler characteristic).

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