Fundamental domains for properly discontinuous affine groups (Q741625)

From the abstract: ``The author constructs a fundamental region for the action on the \(2d+1\)-dimensional affine space of some free, discrete, properly discontinuous groups of affine transformation preserving a quadratic form of signature \((d+1, d)\), where \(d\) is any odd positive integer.'' The affine groups are subgroups \(\Gamma \subset GL_n(\mathbb R) \rtimes \mathbb R^n\) acting properly discontinuously on \(\mathbb R^n\) such that the quotient \(\mathbb R^n/\Gamma\) is compact. The author provides a detailed description of previously known results in low dimension and explains how those results have inspired the results of the present work. The main result is: {Theorem 1.1 (main theorem)} Let \(d\) be an odd positive integer. Then any generalized Schottky subgroup of \(SO(d+1,d)\) with sufficiently contracting generators has a nonempty open set of affine deformations \(\Gamma\) that acts properly discontinuously om \(\mathcal R^{d+1, d}\), with the quotient \(\mathcal R^{d+1,d}/\Gamma\) homeomorphic to a solid \((2d+1)\)-dimensional handlebody. Several intermediate concepts are defined and studied, like for example pseudohyperbolic maps, frames and groups. The hypotheses ``generalized Schottky subgroup'' and ``with sufficiently contracting generators'' involve the definition of metrics on the space and also several intermediate concepts and are is too long and technical to be described here. The paper provides enough details of the proof and the concepts. It is pointed out that the method used does not work for \(d\) even for this special dimension \((d+1,d)\). The work indicates the difficulty of the problem in general .