An almost flat manifold with a cyclic or quaternionic holonomy group bounds (Q726785)

As explained in the introduction of the paper, almost flat manifolds are a class of manifolds larger than flat manifolds, whose importance in Riemannian geometry is specified by the Cheeger-Fukaya-Gromov theorem: They are the fibers in a collapsing sequence of Riemannian manifolds with bounded curvature and diameter. For instance, cuspidal ends of a complete Riemannian manifold with finite volume and negative pinched sectional curvature are almost flat manifolds as such. (A converse to this was given by \textit{P. Ontaneda} [``Riemannian hyperbolization'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1406.1730}]) The paper under review is concerned with the conjecture of \textit{F. T. Farrell} and \textit{S. Zdravkovska} [Mich. Math. J. 30, 199--208 (1983; Zbl 0543.53037)], stating that every almost flat manifold is diffeomorphic to the boundary of a compact manifold. It has also been posed independently by \textit{S. T. Yau} [Proc. Symp. Pure Math. 54, 1--28 (1993; Zbl 0801.53001)]. The conjecture is proven for a large class of almost flat manifolds. Moreover, a simple proof of earlier partial (positive) answers by Farrell and Zdravkovska [loc. cit.], as well as \textit{S. Upadhyay} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 353, No. 3, 963--972 (2001; Zbl 0976.57031)] are given. The authors make use of a cover for an almost flat manifold \(M\) given by \textit{E. A. Ruh} [J. Differ. Geom. 17, 1--14 (1982; Zbl 0468.53036)], generalizing earlier work by Gromov. Such a cover is a double coset arising from a simply connected nilpotent Lie group \(L\) and a certain torsion-free subgroup of the affine group \(L \rtimes \mathrm{Aut}(L)\) . In particular, what is used in the proof is the fact that the map \(\Gamma \to \mathrm{Aut}(L)\) is the holonomy of a certain connection on the tangent bundle of \(M\). The result is that if the 2-Sylow subgroup of the holonomy group is cyclic or generalized quaternionic, then the almost flat manifold \(M\) is the boundary of a compact manifold.