Coarse Alexander duality for pairs and applications

Abstract

For a group $G$ (of type $F$) acting properly on a coarse Poincaré duality space $X$, Kapovich-Kleiner introduced a coarse version of Alexander duality between $G$ and its complement in $X$. More precisely, the cohomology of $G$ with group ring coefficients is dual to a certain Čech homology group of the family of increasing neighborhoods of a $G$-orbit in $X$. This duality applies more generally to coarse embeddings of certain contractible simplicial complexes into coarse $PD(n)$ spaces. In this paper we introduce a relative version of this Čech homology that satisfies the Eilenberg-Steenrod Exactness Axiom, and we prove a relative version of coarse Alexander duality. As an application we provide a detailed proof of the following result, first stated by Kapovich-Kleiner. Given a $2$-complex formed by gluing $k$ halfplanes along their boundary lines and a coarse embedding into a contractible $3$-manifold, the complement consists of $k$ deep components that are arranged cyclically in a pattern called a Jordan cycle. We use the Jordan cycle as an invariant in proving the existence of a $3$-manifold group that is virtually Kleinian but not itself Kleinian.

v3: 33 pages, 3 figures; minor changes