Quotient manifolds of flows

Abstract

This paper investigates which smooth manifolds arise as quotients (orbit spaces) of flows of vector fields. Such quotient maps were already known to be surjective on fundamental groups, but this paper shows that every epimorphism of countably presented groups is induced by the quotient map of some flow, and that higher homology can also be controlled. Manifolds of fixed dimension arising as quotients of flows on Euclidean space realize all even (and some odd) intersection pairings, and all homotopy spheres of dimension at least two arise in this manner. Most Euclidean spaces of dimensions five and higher have families of topologically equivalent but smoothly inequivalent flows with quotient homeomorphic to a manifold with flexibly chosen homology. For [Formula: see text], there is a topological flow on (ℝ2r+1 − 8 points) × ℝm that is unsmoothable, although smoothable near each orbit, with quotient an unsmoothable topological manifold.