\( \mathcal{Z} \)-compactifiable manifolds which are not pseudocollarable (Q2688271)

In the present article the author continues his recent work concerning the difficult and important problem of finding an appropriate boundary for open manifolds. The introduction of the paper gives a nice and coincide picture of the state-of-the-art of this research topic. The famous Siebenmann's old result gives necessary and sufficient conditions for a smooth, open, high-dimensional manifold to be \textit{compactifiable} (i.e. the interior of a smooth compact manifold with boundary). For manifolds with non compact boundaries, one instead looks for a \textit{completion} of the manifold, namely a compact manifold \(\hat M\) and a compactum \(C\) inside \(\partial \hat M\) such that \(\hat M \ C\) is homeomorphic to \(M\). On the other hand, a manifold \(V\) with compact boundary is a \textit{homotopy collar} if \(\partial V \to V\) is a homotopy equivalence. If, in addition, \(V\) contains arbitrarily small homotopy collar neighborhoods of infinity, \(V\) is called a \textit{pseudo-collar}. For instance, Davis' celebrated examples of non simply connected at infinity contractible universal covers are actually pseudo-collarable open manifolds that are not collarable. Another kind of compactification is the so-called \textit{\(\mathcal Z\)-compactification}. This idea came out of the shape theory with the aim of compactifying spaces in a better way, in order to preserve fundamental topological properties of the original space (in such a way that the \(\mathcal Z\)-compactification of \(X\) resembles, homotopically, as similar as possible to \(X\)). The main result of this paper proves that, in every dimension greater than 3, there exist \(\mathcal Z\)-compactifiable manifolds with noncompact boundary which are not pseudocollarable. To achieve this, the author studies in details the fundamental group at infinity of (the product with \([0,1)\) of) a certain contractible 3-manifold with noncompact boundary which embeds in no compact 3-manifold.