SOME HYPERBOLIC THREE-MANIFOLDS THAT BOUND GEOMETRICALLY

A closed connected hyperbolic n-manifold bounds geometrically if it is isometric to the geodesic boundary of a compact hyperbolic (n + 1)-manifold. A. Reid and D. Long have shown by arithmetic methods the existence of infinitely many manifolds that bound geometrically in every dimension. We construct here infinitely many explicit examples in dimension n = 3 using right-angled dodecahedra and 120-cells and a simple colouring technique introduced by M. Davis and T. Januszkiewicz. Namely, for every k >= 1, we build an orientable compact closed 3-manifold tessellated by 16k right-angled dodecahedra that bounds a 4-manifold tessellated by 32k right-angled 120-cells. A notable feature of this family is that the ratio between the volumes of the 4-manifolds and their boundary components is constant and, in particular, bounded.