On s-cobordisms of metacyclic prism manifolds (Q1263848)

The main result of this paper is: Theorem. Let G be a finite group that acts freely and linearly on \(S^ 3\), and suppose that the Sylow 2- subgroup of G is abelian (hence cyclic). (i) If G is abelian (hence cyclic), then every s-cobordism with both ends homeomorphic to the spaceform \(S^ 3/G\) is homeomorphic to the product s-cobordism \(S^ 3/G\times [0,1]\). (ii) If G is nonabelian (hence metacyclic), then there is a 1-1 correspondence between oriented homeomorphism classes of s- cobordisms with both ends homeomorphic to the spaceform \(S^ 3/G\) and elements of the quotient group \(L^ s_ 1(G)/I_ 0\), where \(L^ s_ 1(G)\) is the simple Wall group (with the trivial orientation homomorphism) and \(I_ 0\) is a subgroup of order at most two. The paper is divided into six sections. The first two describe the general method for finding exotic s-cobordisms and contain the proof of statement (i) of the theorem. Section 3 describes the fundamental group of the space of self-maps of a metacyclic prism manifold \(S^ 3/G\) and section 4 contains further work in the case the order of G is not divisible by 8. Section 5 contains, among other things, the proof of statement (ii) of the theorem and section 6 concludes the paper with a weak product theorem for certain s-cobordisms together with some related results and applications.