Topological Hochschild homology and the Bass trace conjecture

We use the methods of topological Hochschild homology to shed new light on the groups satisfying the Bass trace conjecture. We show that the factorization of the Hattori-Stallings rank map through the Bokstedt-Hsiang-Madsen cyclotomic trace map leads to Linnell's restriction on such groups. As a new consequence of this restriction, we show that the conjecture holds for any group G with the property that every subgroup that is isomorphic to the additive group of rational numbers has nontrivial and central image in some quotient of G.