Relating the Farrell Nil-groups to the Waldhausen Nil-groups

Abstract

We prove that the Waldhausen Nil-group associated to a virtually cyclic groups that surjects onto the infinite dihedral group vanishes if and only if the corresponding Farrell Nil-group associated to the canonical index two subgroup is trivial. The proof uses the transfer map to establish one direction, and uses controlled pseudo-isotopy techniques of Farrell-Jones to establish the reverse implication.