On reduced complexity of closed piecewise linear 5-manifolds

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to give some theorems which relate to the problem of classifying combinatorial (resp. smooth) closed 5-manifolds up to piecewise-linear (PL) homeomorphism. For this, we use the combinatorial approach to the topology of PL manifolds by means of a special kind of edge-colored graphs, called crystallizations. Within this representation theory, Bracho and Montejano introduced in 1987 a nonnegative numerical invariant, called the reduced complexity, for any closed n-dimensional PL manifold. Here we obtain the complete classification of all closed connected smooth 5-manifolds of reduced complexity less than or equal to 20. In particular, this gives a combinatorial characterization of $$\mathbb {S}^2 \times \mathbb {S}^3$$ among closed connected spin PL 5-manifolds.