We generalise results of Thomas, Allcock, Thom-Petersen, and Kar-Niblo to the first $\ell^2$-Betti number quotients certain groups acting on trees by subgroups with free actions edge sets graphs.

we establish some relative volume comparison theorems for extremal volume forms of‎ ‎finsler manifolds under suitable curvature bounds‎. ‎as their applications‎, ‎we obtain some results on curvature and topology of finsler manifolds‎. ‎our results remove the usual assumption on s-curvature that is needed in the literature‎.

An important application of the algebraic theory of L2-Betti numbers [10] (see Farber [8] for an alternative approach) is that the L2-Betti numbers β i (Γ ) of a group Γ vanish if it has a normal subgroup whose L2-Betti numbers vanish. With regard to the first L2-Betti number, one can significantly relax the normality condition to obtain similar vanishing results [14]. Peterson and Thom prove i...