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
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
observes that there are restrictions on the Euler characteristic that a closed hyperbolic 4-manifold may possess. In particular, it is shown in
that the Pontrjagin numbers of a hyperbolic manifold
vanish. But the signature
is a rational linear combination of those Pontrjagin numbers, so
. And by Poincare duality,
, so
is even. A natural question to ask is: does there exist a hyperbolic 4-manifold
with
? Now if such an
also had
, 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:
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).
Posted: September 22nd, 2006 under Mathematics.
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