Characteristic invariants of noncompact Riemannian manifolds (Q1077015)

The author generalizes the Phillips-Sullivan theory of the average Euler characteristic of 2-dimensional leaves with nonexponential growth. Using metrics on the leaves induced by Riemannian metrics on the ambient, compact manifold M, he defines the bounded de Rham complex of a leaf and the analogue of the Chern-Weil theory in this bounded cohomology. If the leaf L is closed at infinity, a sequence \(\{L_ n\}\) of compact submanifolds can be selected so that \(\lim_{n\to \infty}(vol(\partial L_ n)/vol(L_ n))=0\) (a ''Plante sequence''). If c is a bounded characteristic class of dimension equal to that of L, then \(c_ n=(1/vol(L_ n))\int_{L_ n}c\) defines a sequence which, up to a suitable notion of ''asymptotic equivalence'', depends only on the cohomology class of c and the choice of Plante sequence \(\{L_ n\}\). The average characteristic number associated to c is said to be zero if the sequence \(\{c_ n\}\) is asymptotically equivalent to the zero sequence, for every choice of Plante sequence. Applied to the Euler class, this definition of average Euler characteristic zero significantly strengthens that of Phillips and Sullivan and applies to leaves of arbitrary (even) dimension.