On the topological complexity of aspherical spaces

The well-known theorem of Eilenberg and Ganea [Ann. Math. 65 (1957) 517–518] expresses the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category of an Eilenberg–MacLane space [Formula: see text] as the cohomological dimension of the group [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we study a similar problem of determining algebraically the topological complexity of the Eilenberg–MacLane spaces [Formula: see text]. One of our main results states that in the case when the group [Formula: see text] is hyperbolic in the sense of Gromov, the topological complexity [Formula: see text] either equals or is by one larger than the cohomological dimension of [Formula: see text]. We approach the problem by studying essential cohomology classes, i.e. classes which can be obtained from the powers of the canonical class (as defined by Costa and Farber) via coefficient homomorphisms. We describe a spectral sequence which allows to specify a full set of obstructions for a cohomology class to be essential. In the case of a hyperbolic group, we establish a vanishing property of this spectral sequence which leads to the main result.