Free actions on products of spheres at high dimensions

Abstract

A classical conjecture in transformation group theory states that if $G=(\bbZ/p)^r$ acts freely on a product of $k$ spheres $S^{n_1} \times ... \times S^{n_k}$, then $r\leq k$. We prove this conjecture in the case where the average of the dimensions ${n_i}$ is large compared to the differences $|n_i-n_j|$ between the dimensions.