On the topology of moduli spaces of non-negatively curved Riemannian metrics

We study spaces and moduli spaces of Riemannian metrics with non-negative Ricci or non-negative sectional curvature on closed and open manifolds. We construct, in particular, the first classes of manifolds for which these moduli spaces have non-trivial rational homotopy, homology and cohomology groups. We also show that in every dimension at least seven (respectively, at least eight) there exist infinite sequences of closed (respectively, open) manifolds of pairwise distinct homotopy type for which the space and moduli space of Riemannian metrics with non-negative sectional curvature has infinitely many path components. A completely analogous statement holds for spaces and moduli spaces of non-negative Ricci curvature metrics.

The spectrum of simplicial volume of non-compact manifolds

We show that, in dimension at least 4, the set of locally finite simplicial volumes of oriented connected open manifolds is $$[0,\infty ]$$ [ 0 , ∞ ] . Moreover, we consider the case of tame open manifolds and some low-dimensional examples.

The Kasparov product on submersions of open manifolds

We study the Kasparov product on (possibly non-compact and incomplete) Riemannian manifolds. Specifically, we show on a submersion of Riemannian manifolds that the tensor sum of a regular vertically elliptic operator on the total space and an elliptic operator on the base space represents the Kasparov product of the corresponding classes in [Formula: see text]-theory. This construction works in general for symmetric operators (i.e. without assuming self-adjointness), and extends known results for submersions with compact fibers. The assumption of regularity for the vertically elliptic operator is not always satisfied, but depends on the topology and geometry of the submersion, and we give explicit examples of non-regular operators. We apply our main result to obtain a factorization in unbounded [Formula: see text]-theory of the fundamental class of a Riemannian submersion, as a Kasparov product of the shriek map of the submersion and the fundamental class of the base manifold.

Open manifolds with non-homeomorphic positively curved souls

We extend two known existence results to simply connected manifolds with positive sectional curvature: we show that there exist pairs of simply connected positively-curved manifolds that are tangentially homotopy equivalent but not homeomorphic, and we deduce that an open manifold may admit a pair of non-homeomorphic simply connected and positively-curved souls. Examples of such pairs are given by explicit pairs of Eschenburg spaces. To deduce the second statement from the first, we extend our earlier work on the stable converse soul question and show that it has a positive answer for a class of spaces that includes all Eschenburg spaces.

Constructing symplectic manifolds

This chapter examines various ways to construct symplectic manifolds and submanifolds. It begins by studying blowing up and down in both the complex and the symplectic contexts. The next section is devoted to a discussion of fibre connected sums and describes Gompf’s construction of symplectic four-manifolds with arbitrary fundamental group. The chapter also contains an exposition of Gromov’s telescope construction, which shows that for open manifolds the h-principle rules and the inclusion of the space of symplectic forms into the space of nondegenerate 2-forms is a homotopy equivalence. The final section outlines Donaldson’s construction of codimension two symplectic submanifolds and explains the associated decompositions of the ambient manifold.