Aspherical 4-manifolds of odd Euler characteristic

Abstract

An explicit construction of closed, orientable, smooth, aspherical 4-manifolds with any odd Euler characteristic greater than 12 is presented. The constructed manifolds are all Haken manifolds in the sense of B. Foozwell and H. Rubinstein and can be systematically reduced to balls by suitably cutting them open along essential codimension-one submanifolds. Euler characteristics divisible by 3 are known to arise from complex algebraic geometry considerations. Examples with Euler characteristic 1, 5, 7, or 11 appear to be unknown.