Groups acting properly on ``bolic'' spaces and the Novikov conjecture (Q1411285)

The paper under reviewing is a fundamental one in which we can follow some new progress in proving the Novikov conjecture and its relation with the Baum-Connes conjecture. In \S 5 the authors state their main result (Theorem 5.2) that for any discrete group \(\Gamma\) acting properly by isometries on a weakly bolic (Definition 2.2), weakly geodesic metric space of bounded coarse geometry (Definition 3.1) and for every \(\Gamma\)-algebra \(A\) the Baum-Connes map (Definition 5.1) \[ \beta^A_{\text{red}} : RK^\Gamma_*(\underline{E}\Gamma; A)= \varinjlim KK^i_\Gamma(C_0(Y),A) \to K_*(C^*_{\text{red}} (\Gamma),A), \] where the limit is taken on cocompact \(\Gamma\)-invariant closed subsets Y in \(\underline{E}\Gamma\), and \(C^*_{\text{red}}(\Gamma)\) is the reduced group C*-algebra of \(\Gamma\), \(\underline{E}\Gamma\) the universal classifying space for free proper actions of \(\Gamma\). From this, the authors then deduced the Novikov conjecture on ``homotopy invariance of higher signatures'' for this kind of discrete groups.