Geometric 4-manifolds in the sense of Thurston and Seifert 4-manifolds. I (Q919670)

In recent years the classical theory of 3-dimensional Seifert fiber spaces has been reformulated under the viewpoint of geometric structures. There are 8 geometries for closed 3-manifolds, and 6 of these give rise to Seifert fiber spaces; moreover each closed orientable Seifert fiber space belongs to one of these 6 geometries. In a similar way, the corresponding 4-dimensional geometries have been classified, and 8 of them give rise to 4-dimensional Seifert fiber spaces (Seifert 4- manifolds); here a Seifert 4-manifold is a manifold with a Seifert fibration by 2-dimensional tori \(T^ 2\) (as regular fibers) over a 2- dimensional base orbifold B. These 8 geometries are \(S^ 2\times E^ 2\), \(S^ 3\times E\) (base B spherical or bad), \(E^ 4\), \(Nil^ 3\times E\), \(Nil^ 4\), \(Sol^ 3\times E\) (B euclidean) and \({\mathbb{H}}^ 2\times E^ 2\), \(SL_ 2\times E\) (B hyperbolic). The present is the first of 2 papers studying in a rather complete way the geometries of Seifert 4-manifolds in terms of Seifert invariants, including the case of nonorientable base B containing reflectors; in the present first paper the cases with euclidean base are done. The main results are as follows. Every closed orientable Seifert 4-manifold admits a geometric structure if the base 2-orbifold B is not hyperbolic (whereas in the hyperbolic case most Seifert 4-manifolds are not geometric). On the other hand, every closed orientable geometric 4-manifold of one of the above 8 types is a Seifert 4-manifold, with one exception (maybe 2, see the remark below) which is \(S^ 1\)-fibered but not \(T^ 2\)-fibered. Moreover it is studied when the fundamental group of a Seifert 4-manifold determines it up to diffeomorphism resp. fiber-preserving diffeomorphism; like in the 3-dimensional case, in some of the 8 cases the same manifold admits several different Seifert fibrations so one can produce lists of these. All of this extends and completes previous work of several authors. The geometric Seifert 4-manifolds contain several interesting classes of 4-manifolds, among them classes of complex surfaces (a connection studied previously by Wall) and most of the euclidean (flat) 4-manifolds \((E^ 4\)-geometry): the one exception mentioned above is such a euclidean 4- manifold with a Seifert fibration by circles (but not by 2-tori), over a euclidean (nonfibered) 3-orbifold which is a quotient of the euclidean Hantzsche-Wendt manifold (holonomy \({\mathbb{Z}}_ 2\oplus {\mathbb{Z}}_ 2)\) by an isometry of order 3 (the quotient is \(S^ 3\) with the figure-8-knot as singular set); however the Hantzsche-Wendt manifold admits also an isometry of order 6 with nonfibered quotient [see, e.g., the reviewer's paper in Monatsh. Math. 110 (1990)], so there seem to be really 2 exceptions, the first one being a 2-fold covering of the second one.