Achirality of Sol 3-Manifolds, Stevenhagen Conjecture and Shimizu's L-series

Abstract

A closed orientable manifold is {\em achiral} if it admits an orientation reversing homeomorphism. A commensurable class of closed manifolds is achiral if it contains an achiral element, or equivalently, each manifold in $\CM$ has an achiral finite cover. Each commensurable class containing non-orientable elements must be achiral. It is natural to wonder how many commensurable classes are achiral and how many achiral classes have non-orientable elements. We study this problem for Sol 3-manifolds. Each commensurable class $\CM$ of Sol 3-manifold has a complete topological invariant $D_{\CM}$, the discriminant of $\CM$. Our main result is: (1) Among all commensurable classes of Sol 3-manifolds, there are infinitely many achiral classes; however ordered by discriminants, the density of achiral commensurable classes is 0. (2) Among all achiral commensurable classes of Sol 3-manifolds, ordered by discriminants, the density of classes containing non-orientable elements is $1-\rho$, where $$\rho :=\prod _{j=1}^{\infty }{\left(1+2^{-j}\right)}^{-1}=0.41942\cdots .$$

19 pages