On the simplicial volume and the Euler characteristic of (aspherical) manifolds (Q2157928)

In this paper, the authors study the following well-known question of Gromov, along with a few related problems and applications. Question: whether an orientable closed aspherical manifold with vanishing simplicial volume has vanishing Euler characteristic, denoted as \((SV\chi)\). In Section 2, the authors review basic material on simplicial volume and related concepts. They also ask a relative version of Question \((SV\chi)\), denoted by \((SV\chi,\partial)\): let \((M,\partial M)\) be an oriented compact aspherical manifold with non-empty \(\pi_1\)-injective aspherical boundary, does \(\|M,\partial M\|=0\) imply \(\chi(M,\partial M)=0\)? It is proved that if \((SV\chi)\) holds in dimensions \(n-1\) and \(n\), then \((SV\chi,\partial)\) holds in dimension \(n\). Section 3 is devoted to surveying and proving results on manifolds with vanishing and non-vanishing simplicial volume. An application of question \((SV\chi)\) on a question of \textit{A. L. Edmonds} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 148, No. 1, 421--434 (2020; Zbl 1485.57018)] is given: if every oriented closed aspherical 3-manifold with amenable \(\pi_1\) is the \(\pi_1\)-injective boundary of an oriented compact aspherical 4-manifold \(W\) with \(\|W,\partial W\|=0\) and \((SV\chi)\) holds in dimension \(4\), then there exists an oriented closed aspherical \(4\)-manifold with \(\chi=1\). In Section 4, the authors define the amenable cobordism category, and show that the simplicial volume is an invertible TQFT on this cobordism category. By using a structure result of simplicial volumes of 4-manifolds, they prove that \(\pi_1\) of the 4-dimensional amenable cobordism category is not finitely generated. They also prove that the simplicial volume can not be extended to a TQFT of the whole cobordism category. Section 5 concerns question \((SV\chi)\) for aspherical spaces and related manifolds. In particular, the authors use the Kan-Thurston construction to construct the following spaces: \begin{itemize} \item An aspherical space \(X\) that admits an acyclic map \(X\to M\) to an oriented closed manifold such that \(X\) does not satisfy \((SV\chi)\). \item An oriented closed manifold \(M\) that admits an acyclic map \(X\to M\) from an aspherical space \(X\) such that \(M\) does not satisfy \((SV\chi)\). \end{itemize} In Section 6, the authors introduce questions analogous to \((SV\chi)\) and \((SV\chi,\partial)\) for the stable integral simplicial volume, and study relations among these questions.