Toral and exponential stabilization for homotopy spherical spaceforms

Abstract

The Atiyah-Singer equivariant signature formula implies that the products of isometrically inequivalent classical spherical space forms with the circle are not homeomorphic, and in fact the same conclusion holds if the circle is replaced by a torus of arbitrary dimension. These results are important in the study of group actions on manifolds. Algebraic K-theory yields standard classes of counterexamples for topological and smooth analogs of spherical spaceforms. The results of this paper characterize pairs of nonhomeomorphic topological spherical space forms whose products with a given torus of arbitrary dimension are homeomorphic, and the main result is that the known counterexamples are the only ones that exist. In particular, this and basic results in lower algebraicK-theory show that if such products are homeomorphic, then the products are already homeomorphic if one uses a 3-dimensional torus. Sharper results are established for important special cases such as fake lens spaces. The methods are basically surgery-theoretic with some input from homotopy theory. One consequence is the existence of new innite families of manifolds in all dimensions greater than three such that the squares of the manifolds are homeomorphic although the manifolds themselves are not. Analogous results are obtained in the smooth category.