Co-rank of weakly parafree 3-manifold groups

Fundamental groups and their automorphisms (group-theoretic aspects) (20F34) General topology of 3-manifolds (57K30) Fundamental group, presentations, free differential calculus (57M05)

Abstract: Recall that a group is called large if it has a finite index subgroup which surjects onto a non-abelian free group. By work of Agol and Cooper-Long-Reid, most 3-manifold groups are large; in particular, the fundamental groups of hyperbolic 3-manifolds are large. In previous work, the first author gave examples of closed, hyperbolic 3-manifolds with arbitrarily large first homology rank but whose fundamental groups do not surject onto a non-abelian free group. We call a group very large if it surjects onto a non-abelian free group. In this paper, we consider the question of whether the groups of homology handlebodies - which are very close to being free - are very large. We show that the fundamental group of W. Thurston's tripus manifold, is not very large; it is known to be weakly parafree by Stallings' Theorem and large by the work of Cooper-Long-Reid since the tripus is a hyperbolic manifold with totally geodesic boundary. It is still unknown if a 3-manifold group that is weakly parafree of rank at least 3 must be very large. However, we more generally consider the co-rank of the fundamental group, also known as the cut number of the manifold. For each positive integer g we construct a homology handlebody Y_g of genus g whose group has co-rank equal to r(g), where r(g)=g/2 for g even and r(g)=(g+1)/2 for g odd. That is, these groups are weakly parafree of rank g and surject onto a free group of rank roughly half of g but no larger.

Review text

The co-rank of a group is the maximum rank of its free epimorphic image; for a 3-manifold \(M\), the co-rank of \(\pi_1(M)\) is the same as the cut number \(c(M)\). The authors call a group very large if its co-rank is greater than 1, that is, if it maps onto a non-commutative free group: \(c(M)>1\). They call a group large if it has a very large finite-index subgroup. The motivation of this work is as follows. Most compact 3-manifold groups are large. Are they very large? Generally, the answer is negative: in her previous work, the first author constructed a manifold of a special kind, with any given first Betti number, such that its group is not very large. On the other hand, the answer is positive for handlebodies \(H_g\) of genus \(g\ge2\), since \(c(H_g)=g\). Can this be extended to homology handlebodies? It looks plausible because their groups are weakly parafree, i.e., very similar to free groups. The question can be also understood as whether weakly parafree 3-manifold groups are very large. While the authors do not arrive at an answer, they show that, for each genus \(g\), the group of some homology handlebody \(Y_g\) is ``half as large as that of the corresponding handlebody: \(c(Y_g)=\lceil\frac12g\rceil\). In particular, the group of the homology handlebody \(Y_2\), which is Thurston's tripus manifold, is not very large. The question of whether examples can be found with even smaller cut number \(c(Y)\), or maybe even with \(c(Y)=1\), i.e., with not very large group, is left open.

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