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The purpose of this paper is to explore whether approximation is possible if the known obstructions vanish, partially generalizing work of Gong-Lin and Eilers-Loring-Pedersen for the free abelian group of rank two, and the Klein bottle group. We show that this is possible, at least in a weak sense, for some `low-dimensional' groups including fundamental groups of closed surfaces, certain Baumslag-Solitar groups, free-by-cyclic groups, and many fundamental groups of three manifolds.
The techniques used in the paper are $K$-theoretic: they have their origin in Baum-Connes-Kasparov type assembly maps, and in the Elliott program to classify $C^*$-algebras; Kasparov's bivariant KK-theory is a crucial tool. The key new technical ingredients are: a stable uniqueness theorem in the sense of Dadarlat-Eilers and Lin that works for non-exact $C^*$-algebras; and an analysis of maps on $K$-theory with finite coefficients in terms of the relative eta invariants of Atiyah-Patodi-Singer. Despite the proofs going through $K$-theoretic machinery, the main theorems can be stated in elementary terms that do not need any $K$-theory.
| Comments: | Version 2 has some more details, minor corrections, and improved references. Version 3 has some technical improvements, and significant improvements to the range of validity of the main results (mainly based on material from (arXiv:2603.18456) |
| Subjects: | Group Theory (math.GR); K-Theory and Homology (math.KT); Operator Algebras (math.OA) |
| MSC classes: | 19K33, 19L35, 19K56, 20C07, 46L80, 46L85, 58B34, 58J22 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2408.13350 [math.GR] |
| (or arXiv:2408.13350v3 [math.GR] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.13350 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
From: Rufus Willett [view email]
[v1]
Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:52:23 UTC (472 KB)
[v2]
Tue, 17 Sep 2024 21:26:34 UTC (477 KB)
[v3]
Thu, 21 May 2026 21:39:46 UTC (485 KB)
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