Coarse Alexander duality and duality groups

Abstract

We study discrete group actions on coarse Poincare duality spaces, e.g. acyclic simplicial complexes which admit free cocompact group actions by Poincare duality groups. When G is an (n-1) dimensional duality group and X is a coarse Poincare duality space of formal dimension n, then a free simplicial action of G on X determines a collection of ``peripheral'' subgroups F_1,...,F_k in G so that the group pair (G;F_1,...,F_k) is an n-dimensional Poincare duality pair. In particular, if G is a 2-dimensional 1-ended group of type FP_2, and X is a coarse PD(3) space, then G contains surface subgroups; if in addition X is simply connected, then we obtain a partial generalization of the Scott/Shalen compact core theorem to the setting of coarse PD(3) spaces.