Gromov's amenable localization and geodesic flows (Q830144)

In previous work with \textit{H. Alpert} [Geom. Dedicata 180, 323--338 (2016; Zbl 1365.53043)], the author showed that the number of \(n\)-part broken trajectories of the gradient flow of a Morse function on a closed \(n\)-manifold can be estimated below by the simplicial volume of the manifold. In [J. Topol. Anal. 8, No. 3, 501--543 (2016; Zbl 1348.53050)], he extended this to traversally generic flows on manifolds with boundary. In the paper under review, this theory is applied to the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle \(SM\) of a Riemannian manifold \(M\), under the assumption that the components of \(\partial M\) have amenable fundamental groups and that the geodesic flow is traversally generic. The traversally generic flow generates a stratification of \(SM\) according to the combinatorial pattern of tangencies to \(\partial M\). The main theorem of the paper gives a lower bound for the number of \((2n-1-j)\)-dimensional connected components in this stratification. This number is shown to be at least the rank of \(H_j^\Delta(M)\), where the latter is the quotient of singular homology \(H_j(M)\) by its subspace of classes of vanishing Gromov norm.