English

Rational spheres and double disk bundles

Differential Geometry 2026-05-12 v2

Abstract

A manifold MM is said to be a double disk bundle if it can be decomposed as a union of two disk bundles glued together by a diffeomorphism of their boundaries. We show that if MnM^n is a closed simply connected nn-manifold with nn even which is simultaneously a double disk bundle and a rational homology sphere, then MM must be homeomorphic to a sphere. In addition, we show that in any dimension, if MM is a highly connected rational homology sphere which supports a double disk bundle structure, then its "middle" cohomlogy group must be cyclic.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.02150,
  title  = {Rational spheres and double disk bundles},
  author = {Jason DeVito and Martin Kerin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.02150},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This version contains a new author, new results on highly connected rational spheres, and the proofs no longer require the disk bundles to be linear. Comments welcome!

R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:48:30.216Z