If $B$ is a toric manifold and $E$ is a Whitney sum of complex line bundles over $B$, then the projectivization $P(E)$ of $E$ is again a toric manifold. Starting with $B$ as a point and repeating this construction, we obtain a sequence of complex projective bundles which we call a generalized Bott tower. We prove that if the top manifold in the tower has the same cohomology ring as a product of complex projective spaces, then every fibration in the tower is trivial so that the top manifold is diffeomorphic to the product of complex projective spaces. This gives a supporting evidence to what we call cohomological rigidity problem for toric manifolds "Are toric manifolds diffeomorphic (or homeomorphic) if their cohomology rings are isomorphic?" We provide two more results which support the cohomological rigidity problem.
A Bott tower is an iterated $\CP ^1$-bundle over a point, where each $\CP ^1$-bundle is the projectivization of a rank $2$ decomposable complex vector bundle. For a Bott tower, the filtered cohomology is naturally defined. We show that isomorphism classes of Bott towers are distinguished by their filtered cohomology rings. We even show that any filtered cohomology ring isomorphism between two Bott towers is induced by an isomorphism of the Bott towers.
We show the strong cohomological rigidity of Hirzebruch surface bundles over Bott manifolds. As a corollary, we have that the strong cohomological rigidity conjecture is true for Bott manifolds of dimension $8$.
The main aim of this article is to study the topology of real Bott towers as special and interesting examples of real toric varieties. We first give a presentation of the fundamental group of a real Bott tower and show that the fundamental group is abelian if and only if the real Bott tower is a product of circles. We further prove that the fundamental group of a real Bott tower is always solvable and it is nilpotent if and only if it is abelian. We then describe the cohomology ring of a real Bott tower and also give recursive formulae for the Steifel Whitney classes. We derive combinatorial c…
We study the geometry of Bott towers in the context of toric geometry, describing their associated fans arising from crosspolytopes. We compute the cohomology ring of each stage of the tower, and provide all monomial identities defining related affine toric varieties.
To a direct sum of holomorphic line bundles, we can associate two fibrations, whose fibers are, respectively, the corresponding full flag manifold and the corresponding projective space. Iterating these procedures gives, respectively, a flag Bott tower and a generalized Bott tower. It is known that a generalized Bott tower is a toric manifold. However a flag Bott tower is not toric in general but we show that it is a GKM manifold, and we also show that for a given generalized Bott tower we can find the associated flag Bott tower so that the closure of a generic torus orbit in the latter is a b…
We shall introduce a notion of $S^1$-fibred nilBott tower. It is an iterated $S^1$-bundles whose top space is called an $S^1$-fibred nilBott manifold and the $S^1$-bundle of each stage realizes a Seifert construction. The nilBott tower is a generalization of real Bott tower from the viewpoint of fibration. In this note we shall prove that any $S^1$-fibred nilBott manifold is diffeomorphic to an infranilmanifold. According to the group extension of each stage, there are two classes of $S^1$-fibred nilBott manifolds which is defined as finite type or infinite type. We discuss their properties.
We describe Bott towers as sequences of toric manifolds M^k, and identify the omniorientations which correspond to their original construction as toric varieties. We show that the suspension of M^k is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of Thom complexes, and display its complex K-theory as an algebra over the coefficient ring. We extend the results to KO-theory for several families of examples, and compute the effects of the realification homomorphism; these calculations breathe geometric life into Bahri and Bendersky's recent analysis of the Adams Spectral Sequence. By way of application we inves…
A Bott tower is the total space of a tower of fibre bundles with base CP^1 and fibres CP^1. Every Bott tower of height n is a smooth projective toric variety whose moment polytope is combinatorially equivalent to an n-cube. A circle action is semifree if it is free on the complement to fixed points. We show that a (quasi)toric manifold (in the sense of Davis-Januszkiewicz) over an n-cube with a semifree circle action and isolated fixed points is a Bott tower. Then we show that every Bott tower obtained in this way is topologically trivial, that is, homeomorphic to a product of 2-spheres. This …
A real Bott tower is obtained as the orbit space of the $n$-torus $T^n$ by the free action of an elementary abelian 2-group $(\mathbb{Z}_2)^n$. This paper deals with the classification of 5-dimensional real Bott towers and study certain type of $n$-dimensional real Bott towers ($n\geq 6$).
This work continues the study of a homotopy-theoretic construction of the author inspired by the Bott-Taubes integrals. Bott and Taubes constructed knot invariants by integrating differential forms along the fiber of a bundle over the space of knots. Their techniques were later used by Cattaneo et al. to construct real "Vassiliev-type" cohomology classes in spaces of knots in higher-dimensional Euclidean space. By doing this integration via a Pontrjagin-Thom construction, we constructed cohomology classes in the knot space with arbitrary coefficients. We later showed that a refinement of this …
Manfred Stelzer has pointed out that part of Corollary 4.5 of our paper "Topological nonrealization results via the Goodwillie tower approach to iterated loopspace homology" [Alg. Geo. Top. 8 (2008), 2109--2129] was not sufficiently proved, and, indeed, is likely incorrect as stated. This necessitates a little more argument to finish the proof of the main theorem of the original paper. The statement of this theorem, and all the examples, remain unchanged.
We prove a strengthened version of a theorem of Lionel Schwartz that says that certain modules over the Steenrod algebra cannot be the mod 2 cohomology of a space. What is most interesting is our method, which replaces his iterated use of the Eilenberg--Moore spectral sequence by a single use of the spectral sequence converging to the mod 2 cohomology of Omega^nX obtained from the Goodwillie tower for the suspension spectrum of Omega^nX. Much of the paper develops basic properties of this spectral sequence.
Complexification, from real connective K-theory to complex connective K-theory, sits in a well-known cofiber sequence between multiplication by eta and a map related to realification. We show how this cofiber sequence factors as one goes up the Postnikov towers of ko and ku. There are 5 distinct cofiber sequences which then repeat under Bott periodicity.
We describe a new link between the theory of topological modular forms and representations of vertex operator algebras obtained by certain lattices. The construction is motivated by the arithmetic Whitehead tower of the orthogonal groups. The tower discloses the role of codes in representation theory.
As a first goal, it is explained why Goodwillie-Weiss calculus of embeddings offers new information about the Euclidean embedding dimension of P^m only for m < 16. Concrete scenarios are described in these low-dimensional cases, pinpointing where to look for potential, but critical, high-order obstructions in the corresponding Taylor towers. For m > 15, the relation TC^S(P^m) > n-1 is translated into the triviality of a certain cohomotopy Euler class which, in turn, becomes the only Taylor obstruction to producing an n-dimensional Euclidean embedding of P^m. A speculative bordism-type form of …
In this paper we investigate what kind of manifolds arise as the total spaces of iterated $S^1$-bundles. A real Bott tower studied in \cite{CMO}, \cite{KM} and \cite{KN} is an example of an iterated $S^1$-bundle. We show that the total space of an iterated $S^1$-bundle is homeomorphic to an infra-nilmanifold. A real Bott manifold, which is the total space of a real Bott tower, provides an example of a closed flat Riemannian manifold. We also show that real Bott manifolds are the only closed flat Riemannian manifolds obtained from iterated $\bbr{P}^1$-bundles. Finally we classify the homeomorph…
We study the continuous (co-)homology of towers of spectra, with emphasis on a tower with homotopy inverse limit the Tate construction X^{tG} on a G-spectrum X. When G=C_p is cyclic of prime order and X=B^p is the p-th smash power of a bounded below spectrum B with H_*(B) of finite type, we prove that (B^p)^{tC_p} is a topological model for the Singer construction R_+(H^*(B)) on H^*(B). There is a map epsilon_B : B --> (B^p)^{tC_p} inducing the Ext_A-equivalence epsilon : R_+(H^*(B)) --> H^*(B). Hence epsilon_B and the canonical map Gamma : (B^p)^{C_p} --> (B^p)^{hC_p} are p-adic equivalences.
A large variety of cohomology theories is derived from complex cobordism MU^*(-) by localizing with respect to certain elements or by killing regular sequences in MU_*. We study the relationship between certain pairs of such theories which differ by a regular sequence, by constructing topological analogues of algebraic I-adic towers. These give rise to Higher Bockstein spectral sequences, which turn out to be Adams spectral sequences in an appropriate sense. Particular attention is paid to the case of completed Johnson--Wilson theory E(n)-hat and Morava K-theory K(n) for a given prime p.
The non-equivariant topology of Stiefel manifolds has been studied extensively, culminating in a result of Miller demonstrating that a Stiefel manifold splits stably to a wedge of Thom spaces over Grassmannians. Equivariantly, one can consider spaces of isometries between representations as an analogue to Stiefel manifolds. This concept, however, yields a different theory to the non-equivariant case. We first construct a variation on the theory of the functional calculus before studying the homotopy-theoretic properties of this theory. This allows us to construct the main result; a natural tow…
Let F be a homotopy functor with values in the category of spectra. We show that partially stabilized cross-effects of F have an action of a certain operad. For functors from based spaces to spectra, it is the Koszul dual of the little discs operad. For functors from spectra to spectra it is a desuspension of the commutative operad. It follows that the Goodwillie derivatives of F are a right module over a certain `pro-operad'. For functors from spaces to spectra, the pro-operad is a resolution of the topological Lie operad. For functors from spectra to spectra, it is a resolution of the trivia…
A quasitoric manifold (resp. a small cover) is a $2n$-dimensional (resp. an $n$-dimensional) smooth closed manifold with an effective locally standard action of $(S^1)^n$ (resp. $(\mathbb Z_2)^n$) whose orbit space is combinatorially an $n$-dimensional simple convex polytope $P$. In this paper we study them when $P$ is a product of simplices. A generalized Bott tower over $\F$, where $\F=\C$ or $\R$, is a sequence of projective bundles of the Whitney sum of $\F$-line bundles starting with a point. Each stage of the tower over $\F$, which we call a generalized Bott manifold, provides an example…
We give a topological explanation of the main results of V.Shchigolev, Categories of Bott-Samelson Varieties, Algebras and Representation Theory, 23 (2), 349-391, 2020. To this end, we consider some subspaces of Bott-Samelson varieties invariant under the action of the maximal compact torus $K$ and study their topological and homological properties. Moreover, we describe multiplicative generators of the equivariant cohomologies of Bott-Samelson varieties.
Recently, Cohen and Vandembroucq proved that the reduced topological complexity of the Klein bottle is 4. Simultaneously and independently, we announced a proof of the same result. Mistakes were found in our argument, which was quite different than theirs. After correcting these, we found that our description of the obstruction class agreed with theirs. Our approach to showing that this obstruction is nonzero failed to do so, while theirs did not fail. Here we discuss our approach, which deals more directly with the simplicial structure of the Klein bottle.
We study the Postnikov tower of the classifying space of a compact Lie group P(n,mn), which gives obstructions to lifting a topological Brauer class of period $n$ to a PU_{mn}-torsor, where the base space is a CW complex of dimension 8. Combined with the study of a twisted version of Atiyah-Hirzebruch spectral sequence, this solves the topological period-index problem for CW complexes of dimension 8.
Our results are of three types. First we describe a general procedure of adjoining polynomial variables to $A_\infty$-ring spectra whose coefficient rings satisfy certain restrictions.A host of examples of such spectra is provided by killing a regular ideal in the coefficient ring of MU, the complex cobordism spectrum. Second, we show that the algebraic procedure of adjoining roots of unity carries over in the topological context for such spectra. Third, we use the developed technology to compute the homotopy types of spaces of strictly multiplicative maps between suitable K(n)-localizations o…
Studying the M-branes leads us naturally to new structures that we call Membrane-, Membrane^c-, String^K(Z,3)- and Fivebrane^K(Z,4)-structures, which we show can also have twisted counterparts. We study some of their basic properties, highlight analogies with structures associated with lower levels of the Whitehead tower of the orthogonal group, and demonstrate the relations to M-branes.
We develop a generalization of manifold calculus in the sense of Goodwillie-Weiss where the manifold is replaced by a simplicial complex. We consider functors from the category of open subsets of a fixed simplical complex into the category of topological spaces and prove an analogue of the approximation theorem. Namely, under certain conditions such a functor can be approximated by a tower of (appropriately adapted) polynomial functors.
