Fundamental group of closed orientable aspherical 3-manifold is infinite

algebraic-topologyfundamental-groupsgeneral-topologygeometric-topologymanifolds

I am trying to show that if $M$ is a closed orientable aspherical and irreducible 3-manifold, then $\pi_{1}(M)$ is torsion free. The problem reduces to showing that $\pi_{1}(M)$ is infinite, as then one can apply Corollary 9.9 of J.Hempel "3-manifolds":

Suppose M is a prime 3-manifold with $\pi_{1}(M) $ infinite. If M contains no 2-sided projective plane, then $\pi_{1}(M)$ is torsion free.

This far I only found that for a closed orientable 3-manifold, being aspherical is supposed to be equivalent to being irreducible and having infinite fundamental group. This is supposed to follow from the sphere theorem, but I can't figure out how. Any help to show why $\pi_{1}(M)$ is infinite if $M$ is closed orientable and aspherical would be appreciated.

Best Answer

An aspherical manifold must have contractible universal cover, but if $\pi_1(M)$ is finite then the universal cover $\widetilde{M}$ is a finite cover, hence a closed $3$-manifold, and so cannot be contractible. This argument is not specific to the $3$-dimensional case and shows that if $M$ is any aspherical closed manifold (of positive dimension) then $\pi_1(M)$ is infinite.

We can even show more generally that any aspherical manifold, not necessarily closed, has $\pi_1(M)$ infinite (or zero). If $\pi_1(M)$ were finite and nonzero then $M$ must have a finite cover which is an Eilenberg-MacLane space $K(\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}, 1)$ for some prime $p$ (consider the cover corresponding to the cyclic subgroup generated by any element of $\pi_1(M)$ of prime order). The homology and cohomology of these spaces is known (it's the group homology / cohomology of $\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}$) and in particular is nonzero in arbitrarily high degree, so they can't be homotopy equivalent to manifolds.