The spectrum of simplicial volume of non-compact manifolds (Q2665229)

Given an oriented connected \(n\)-manifold without boundary \(M\), the \textit{locally finite simplicial volume} of \(M\) is defined as \[ \| M \|^{\mathrm{lf}} :=\inf \{| c|_1 : c \in C^{\mathrm{lf}}_n(M; \mathbb{R}) \mbox{ is a locally finite fundamental cycle of } M \}, \] where \(C^{\mathrm{lf}}_*(M; \mathbb{R})\) denotes the locally finite singular chain complex and \(|c|_1\) is the \(\ell^1\)-norm of \(c\). When \(M\) is compact, one gets the classical notion of \textit{simplicial volume}. A natural question is to understand the set of possible values of the (locally finite) simplicial volume. Let \(\mathrm{SV}^{\mathrm{lf}}(n)\) denote the set of all locally finite simplicial volumes of oriented connected \(n\)-manifolds without boundary and let \(\mathrm{SV}(n) \subset \mathrm{SV}^{\mathrm{lf}}(n)\) be the subset of all simplicial volumes of oriented closed connected \(n\)-manifolds. In a previous paper~[\textit{N. Heuer} and \textit{C. Löh}, Invent. Math. 223, No. 1, 103--148 (2021; Zbl 1475.57036)] the authors proved that for every \(n \geq 4\) the set \(\mathrm{SV}(n)\) is a countable dense subset of \(\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}\) which contains \(0\). By contrast, in this article Heuer and Löh show that for every \(n \geq 4\) we have \(\mathrm{SV}^{\mathrm{lf}}(n) = [0, \infty]\) (Theorem~A). The proof of this result combines the fact that \(\mathrm{SV}(n)\) is dense in \(\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}\) with an \textit{ad hoc} construction based on connected sums. Note that the manifolds realising Theorem~A can be chosen to be Riemannian with finite volume (Remark~2.3). Moreover, the authors study the subset \(\mathrm{SV}^{\mathrm{lf}}_{\mathrm{tame}}(n) \subset \mathrm{SV}^{\mathrm{lf}}(n)\) consisting of the values of the locally simplicial volume of oriented connected tame manifolds (i.e., manifolds which are homeomorphic to the interior of an oriented compact connected manifold with non-empty boundary). First, Heuer and Löh show that the set \(\mathrm{SV}^{\mathrm{lf}}_{\mathrm{tame}}(n)\) is countable for every \(n \in \mathbb{N}\) (Theorem~B). Then they explicitly compute \(\mathrm{SV}^{\mathrm{lf}}(2)\), \(\mathrm{SV}_{\mathrm{tame}}^{\mathrm{lf}}(2)\) (Proposition~4.2) and \(\mathrm{SV}_{\mathrm{tame}}^{\mathrm{lf}}(3)\) (Proposition~4.3). The key ingredient in the proof of Theorem~B is to show that there are only countably many proper homotopy types of tame manifolds (Proposition~3.2). The problem of giving an explicit description of the set \(\mathrm{SV}^{\mathrm{lf}}(3)\) remains open (Question~1.4).