Hyperbolic 5-manifolds that fiber over \(S^1\) (Q2689265)

Hyperbolic 3-manifolds which fiber over the circle are among the founding and motivating examples of Thurston's hyperbolization and geometrization program for 3-manifolds. The best-known example of a finite-volume hyperbolic 3-manifold fibering over the circle is the complement of the (fibered) figure-eight knot; moreover a fibered 3-manifold is hyperbolic if and only if the monodromy is a pseudo-Anosov surface-diffeomorphism of the fiber. The situation in higher dimensions is more sporadic, in particular it has been an open question whether such fibrations of hyperbolic manifolds exist also in higher dimensions (probably there are plenty of examples but such fibrations are difficult to detect since no conceptual general criterion is available); by an application of Gauss-Bonnet, such examples cannot exist in even dimensions. In the present paper, the authors exhibit the first examples of finite-volume cusped hyperbolic 5-manifolds fibering over the circle, among them the hyperbolic 5-manifold \(N^5\) of smallest known volume (with two cusps) constructed by \textit{J. G. Ratcliffe} and \textit{S. T. Tschantz} [Geom. Dedicata 107, 187--209 (2004; Zbl 1073.57011)] (the monodromy of the fiber \(F\) in such examples has infinite order in \(\mathrm{Out} (\pi_1(F))\) and, since by Mostov Rigidity the outer automorphism group of a finite-volume hyperbolic manifold of dimension at least 3 is finite, the fiber \(F\) cannot admit any hyperbolic metric). The authors start with a hyperbolic 5-manifold \(M^5\) (with 40 cusps) constructed from a right-angled polytope via a standard colouring technique; their main tool to build a fibration \(f: M^5 \to S^1\) is the piecewise-linear Morse theory of \textit{M. Bestvina} and \textit{N. Brady} [Invent. Math. 129, No. 3, 445--470 (1997; Zbl 0888.20021)], inspired also by a paper of Jankievicz, Norin and Wise on virtually fibering right-angled Coxeter groups. The manifold \(N^5\) with two cusps and of smallest known volume is commensurable with \(M^5\). As a consequence, the authors obtain also the first example of a finite type subgroup of a hyperblic group that is not hyperbolic. What remains open is the existence of hyperboic manifolds fibering over the circle in odd dimensions larger than 5, and of closed fibered manifolds in all dimensions \(\ge 5\).