Extendible and stably extendible vector bundles over real projective spaces

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study extendibility and stable extendibility of vector bundles over real projective spaces. We determine a necessary and sufficient condition that a vector bundle ζ over the real projective n-space RPn is extendible (or stably extendible) to RPm for every m>n in the case where ζ is the complexification of the tangent bundle of RPn and in the case where ζ is the normal bundle associated to an immersion of RPn in the Euclidean (n+k)-space Rn+k or its complexification, and give examples of the normal bundle which is extendible to RPN but is not stably extendible to RPN+1.