Atoroidal surface bundles over surfaces. (Q2655450)

A `surface group' is the fundamental group of a closed orientable surface other than the 2-sphere. A `surface-by-surface group' is a group \(G\) with a normal subgroup \(N\), such that both \(N\) and \(G/N\) are surface groups. They are referred to as `fibre' and `base' groups, respectively. The genera of the respective surfaces are the `fibre genus' and the `base genus'. A group is called `atoroidal' if it contains no free Abelian subgroup of rank 2. It is shown: Theorem 0. There are only finitely many isomorphism classes of atoroidal surface-by-surface groups with any given base and fibre genera. Thereby an isomorphism is assumed to respect the fibre subgroups. Any surface-by-surface group gives us a monodromy homomorphism from the base group \(\Gamma\) to the mapping class group \(\mathcal M\) of the fibre surface. Theorem 0 can be generalised to the case where \(\Gamma\) is a finitely presented one-ended group. This statement is proven elsewhere using Theorem 8.1 of the paper.