Homotopy equivalence and homeomorphism of 3-manifolds (Q1208245)

Three decades ago, Waldhausen (and Heil, in a nonorientable version) proved that if \(M\) and \(M'\) are Haken 3-manifolds (i.e. orientable and irreducible, and contain 2-sided properly imbedded incompressible 2- manifolds) then any proper homotopy equivalence from \(M\) to \(M'\) is homotopic to a homeomorphism. Conjecturally the same is true whenever the manifolds are orientable, irreducible, and have infinite fundamental group (it can fail if the fundamental groups are finite) even if they do not contain incompressible 2-manifolds, but extensive efforts to extend Waldhausen's work have yielded only modest success. In the paper under review, the authors prove the conjecture assuming that the manifolds contain immersed surfaces satisfying certain geometric conditions. They give several examples of non-Haken aspherical 3-manifolds which contain the required kind of immersed surface; in particular, their result applies to the examples of Aitchison and Rubinstein (for example, the Seifert-Weber manifold) which admit nonpositive-curvature cubings. Also, certain totally geodesic surfaces in hyperbolic manifolds can be shown to satisfy the required conditions. The conditions on the immersed surface \(F\) are (1) the 1-line intersection property, which means that the pre-image of \(F\) in the universal cover of \(M\) consists of a collection of imbedded planes, any two of which either intersect transversely in a single line or are disjoint, and (2) the 4-plane property, where the \(k\)-plane property asserts that in each set of \(k\) distinct planes in the preimage at least two are disjoint. A long geometric argument shows that a (general position) immersion satisfying these two conditions is homotopic to one which minimizes the number of triple points in its homotopy class, and still satisfies the two conditions. Further examination shows that homotopic immersions satisfying the 1-line intersection property and the 4-plane intersection property are homotopic to immersions with homeomorphic images. Given homotopy equivalent non-Haken manifolds \(M\) and \(M'\), where \(M\) contains an immersion satisfying (1) and (2), a homeomorphism can be constructed between regular neighborhoods of the image of the immersion (after homotopy) and of the corresponding immersion in \(M'\), and this homeomorphism extends to their complements (which must be handlebodies). The authors close with the question of whether every non-Haken 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group admits an immersion satisfying the 1-line intersection property and the 4-plane property.