Kähler manifolds and fundamental groups of negatively δ-pinched manifolds

In this note, we will show that the fundamental group of any negatively δ-pinched (δ > 14) manifold can’t be the fundamental group of a quasi-compact Kähler manifold. As a consequence of our proof, we also show that any nonuniform lattice in F4(−20) cannot be the fundamental group of a quasi-compact Kähler manifold. The corresponding result for uniform lattices was proved by Carlson and Hernández [3]. Finally, we follow Gromov and Thurston [6] to give some examples of negatively δ-pinched manifolds (δ > 14) of finite volume which, as topological manifolds, admit no hyperbolic metric with finite volume under any smooth structure. This shows that our result for δ-pinched manifolds is a nontrivial generalization of the fact that no nonuniform lattice in SO(n, 1)(n ≥ 3) is the fundamental group of a quasi-compact Kähler manifold [21].