On a conjecture of E. Rapaport Strasser about knot-like groups and its pro-\(p\) version. (Q2581281)

A finitely presented group is called knot-like if it has Abelianization \(G/G'\cong\mathbb{Z}\) and deficiency 1. It was conjectured by E. Rapaport Strasser that if the commutator subgroup \(G'\) of a knot-like group \(G\) is finitely generated, then \(G'\) should be free. In this paper the author proves the conjecture in the special case when \(G'\) is residually finite. The proof uses some results about groups of deficiency 1 obtained with the help of \(L^2\)-homology methods and some results about higher dimensional homological \(\Sigma\)-invariants of groups. The theorem about Rapaport's conjecture is obtained as a corollary of a more general result: assume that \(G\) is a discrete group of geometric dimension \(n\) with a finite \(K(G,1)\) CW-complex \(Y\) of dimension \(n\) such that \(Y\) has Euler characteristic 0; if \(N\) is a residually finite normal subgroup of \(G\), \(N\) is of homological type \(\text{FP}_{n-1}\) and \(G/N\cong\mathbb{Z}\), then \(N\) is of homological type \(\text{FP}_n\) and \(G/N\) has finite virtual cohomological dimension \(\text{vcd}(G/N)=\text{cd}(G)-\text{cd}(N)\); in particular either \(N\) has finite index in \(G\) or \(\text{cd}(N)\leq\text{cd}(G)-1\). Several other corollaries of this result are discussed in the paper. The author proves also a pro-\(p\) version of the above theorem under the weaker assumption that \(G/N\) is a pro-\(p\) group of finite rank. Consequently a pro-\(p\) version of Rapaport's conjecture holds.