Coherence and negative sectional curvature in complexes of groups (Q376665)

In the paper under review, the authors revisit the notion of combinatorial curvature and use it to provide new criteria for a group acting properly discontinuously on a simply connected 2-complex to be coherent (every finitely generated subgroup is finitely presented) or to be locally quasiconvex (each finitely generated subgroup is quasiconvex, that is, there exists a number \(L\) such that geodesics joining any two points in the Cayley graph lie in an \(L\)-neighborhood of the subgroup). In particular, the authors extend to groups with torsion the methods developed in the paper [\textit{D. T. Wise}, Geom. Funct. Anal. 14, No. 2, 433--468 (2004; Zbl 1058.57003)]. The extension involves a generalization of the notion of sectional curvature and an extension of the combinatorial Gauss-Bonnet theorem to complexes of groups. It involves the use of \(\ell^2\)-Betti numbers.