An obstruction to the smoothability of singular nonpositively curved metrics on 4-manifolds by patterns of incompressible tori (Q897002)

The main object of this paper is to give new examples of closed smooth 4-manifolds which support singular metrics of nonpositive sectional curvature, but no smooth ones, thereby answering affirmatively a question of Gromov. More precisely, the author proves the following result (Theorem 1): If \(V\) is a closed 4-dimensional manifold which admits a non-trivial finite branched covering \(\beta : V\longrightarrow \Sigma\times \Sigma\) over the product of a hyperbolic surface \(\Sigma\) with itself such that the branching locus equals the diagonal \(\triangle_{\Sigma}\subset \Sigma\times\Sigma\), then \(V\) admits no smooth Riemannian metric of nonpositive sectional curvature. The above theorem is an application of a more general result (Theorem 2), which provides an obstruction for a discrete group \(f_i\) to act geometrically on a Hadamard manifold. The obstruction comes from patterns of incompressible 2-tori sufficiently complicated to force branching of geodesics for nonpositively curved metrics.