Diffeomorphism groups of prime 3-manifolds (Q6145330)

For a compact (non-Haken) 3-manifold modeled on the Thurston geometry Nil (the nilpotent Heisenberg group), the main result of the paper states that the inclusion of the isometry group of \(X\) into its diffeomorphism group \(\mathrm{Diff}(X)\) is a homotopy equivalence (basically, these manifolds are Seifert fiber spaces over Euclidean 2-orbifolds with non-zero Euler number). As the authors note, combining this with earlier work by many authors, this completes the determination of the homotopy type of \(\mathrm{Diff}(X)\) for any compact, orientable, prime 3-manifold \(X\). The proof of the main theorem is based on Ricci flow and follows closely the lines of a previous paper by the present authors ([J. Am. Math. Soc. 36, No. 2, 563--589 (2023; Zbl 1518.53072)]). ``Together with previous work, we have shown that singular Ricci flow offers a uniform approach to studying diffeomorphism groups of large classes of prime manifolds: spherical space forms, hyperbolic manifolds, \(S^2 \times S^1\) and non-Haken manifolds modeled on Nil. We expect that the methods from this paper can be readily adapted to also cover the non-Haken case modeled on \(\mathbb H^2 \times \mathbb R\) and \(\tilde{\mathrm{SL}}(2, \mathbb R)\) and the Haken case modeled on Solv, which were covered by McCullough and Soma and Hatcher).''