On the (super)additivity of simplicial volume

Abstract: We show that the simplicial volume is superadditive with respect to gluings along certain submanifolds of the boundary. Our criterion applies to boundary connected sums and 1-handle attachments. Moreover, we generalize a well-known additivity result in the case of aspherical manifolds. Our arguments are based on new results about relative bounded cohomology and pairs of multicomplexes, which are of independent interest.