Geometrically bounding 3-manifolds, volume and Betti numbers (Q6164250)

A closed hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold \(M\) is called geometrically bounding if it is the only boundary of a totally geodesic hyperbolic \(4\)-manifold. In the paper under review, for each positive integer \(n\) and each odd integer \(k\in [1, 5n+3]\), the authors construct a geometrically bounding closed hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold \(M\) with the 1st Betti number \(\beta^{1}(M)=k\) and its volume \(\operatorname{vol}(M)=16nv\), where \(v\) is the volume of the regular right-angled hyperbolic dodecahedron \(P\) in \(\mathbb{H}^{3}\). As a consequence, the authors show that there are infinitely many geometrically bounding \(3\)-manifolds with \(\beta^{1}(M)=k\). To construct a geometrically bounding closed hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold \(M\), the authors use real toric \(3\)-manifolds. Due to the theory of Davis-Januszkiewicz, it is known that a real toric \(3\)-manifold can be constructed from a simple convex polytope \(P\) with \(\mathbb{Z}_{2}^{3}\)-coloring \(\lambda\); the constructed manifold is denoted by \(M(P,\lambda)\). As one of the key lemmas to show the main theorem, the authors construct a \(\mathbb{Z}_{2}^{3}\)-coloring \(\lambda\) over the polytope \(nP\), where \(P\) is the regular right-angled hyperbolic dodecahedron \(P\) in \(\mathbb{H}^{3}\) and \(nP\) is the polytope obtained by stacking \(n\) copies of \(P\). The constructed manifold \(M(nP,\lambda)\) is a non-orientable real toric \(3\)-manifold whose oriented double covering called \(M(nP,\delta)\) has \(\beta^{1}(M(nP,\delta))=n+1\). To construct such manifolds and compute their Betti numbers, the authors need to analyze matrices of large size which are defined by the colorings. The paper takes care to make them visualized and easy to read.