Fundamental groups of compact manifolds and symmetric geometry of noncompact type (Q1284459)

One of the main problems in the study of superrigid properties of symmetric spaces of noncompact type (and their groups of isometries) is to determine the restrictions on the fundamental groups of manifolds whose geometry and/or dynamics are closely related to such spaces. The main contribution of this paper consists of providing a geometric notion of Zimmer's topological engagement condition (geometric in the sense that it uses Riemannian distance). This new notion is then used, together with known foliated harmonic map techniques, to prove rigidity results (in terms of providing topological obstructions) for compact manifolds with suitable geometry or dynamics closely related to that of certain symmetric spaces of noncompact type. One of the benefits of this new approach includes improvements of some known results. Moreover, the authors establish topological restrictions for Riemannian manifolds whose universal cover has a suitable de Rham factor, as well as geometric obstructions for nonpositively curved compact manifolds to have fundamental groups isomorphic to certain groups built out of cocompact lattices in higher rank simple Lie groups.