Related papers: Highly connected manifolds of positive $p$-curvatu…
The twisted suspension of a manifold is obtained by surgery along the fibre of a principal circle bundle over the manifold. It generalizes the spinning operation for knots and preserves various topological properties. In this article, we…
The symmetry-rank of a riemannian manifold is by definition the rank of its isometry group. We determine precisely which smooth closed manifolds admit a positively curved metric with maximal symmetry-rank.
In a recent article, the authors constructed a six-parameter family of highly connected 7-manifolds which admit an SO(3)-invariant metric of non-negative sectional curvature. Each member of this family is the total space of a Seifert…
We consider the problem of preserving positive Ricci curvature along connected sums. In this context, based on earlier work by Perelman, Burdick introduced the notion of core metrics and showed that the connected sum of manifolds with core…
This is a survey of the current state of the question "Which closed connected manifolds of dimension $n\ge 5$ admit Riemannian metrics whose scalar curvature function is everywhere positive?" The introduction gives a brief overview of these…
We derive the $s$-invariants of certain simply connected $7$-manifolds whose second homology groups are isomorphic to $\mathbb{Z}^{2}$. We apply the $s$-invariants to give a partial classification of simply connected total spaces of circle…
We classify, up to homeomorphisms, the closed simply-connected 4-manifolds that admit a Riemannian metric for which averages of pairs of sectional curvatures of orthogonal planes are positive.
We study the classification of closed, smooth, spin, $1$-connected $7$-manifolds whose integral cohomology ring is isomorphic to $H^*(\mathbb{C}P^2\times S^3)$. We also prove that if the integral cohomology ring of a closed, smooth, spin,…
The Schouten tensor \ $A$ \ of a Riemannian manifold \ $(M,g)$ provides important scalar curvature invariants $\sigma_k$, that are the symmetric functions on the eigenvalues of $A$, where, in particular, $\sigma_1$ \ coincides with the…
In this paper, I shall demonstrate that sufficiently high-dimensional closed positively-curved Riemannian manifolds are either diffeomorphic to a spherical space form, or isometric to a locally compact rank one symmetric space. This…
For $k \ge 2,$ let $M^{4k-1}$ be a $(2k{-}2)$-connected closed manifold. If $k \equiv 1$ mod $4$ assume further that $M$ is $(2k{-}1)$-parallelisable. Then there is a homotopy sphere $\Sigma^{4k-1}$ such that $M \sharp \Sigma$ admits a…
In this paper, we define a relative $L^2$-$\rho$-invariant for Dirac operators on odd-dimensional spin manifolds with boundary and show that they are invariants of the bordism classes of positive scalar curvature metrics which are collared…
We show an equivariant bordism principle for constructing metrics of positive scalar curvature that are invariant under a given group action. Furthermore, we develop a new codimension-2 surgery technique which removes singular strata from…
Rigidity results are obtained for Riemannian $d$-manifolds with $\sec \geqslant 1$ and spherical rank at least $d-2>0$. Conjecturally, all such manifolds are locally isometric to a round sphere or complex projective space with the…
This paper shows that, away from 6, the kernel of the Witten genus is precisely the ideal consisting of (bordism classes of) Cayley plane bundles with connected structure group, but only after restricting the Witten genus to string bordism.…
A Riemannian manifold is called almost positively curved if the set of points for which all $2$-planes have positive sectional curvature is open and dense. We find three new examples of almost positively curved manifolds: $Sp(3)/Sp(1)^2$,…
We examine several classes of manifolds which have the same cohomology ring as an Eschenburg space (a family of biquotients which is a main source of manifolds with positive curvature). One family are the 3-sphere bundles over CP^2. Another…
Let $M$ be a simply connected spin manifold of dimension at least six which admits a metric of positive scalar curvature. We show that the observer moduli space of positive scalar curvature metrics on $M$ has non-trivial higher homotopy…
A (compact) manifold with fibered $P$-singularities is a (possibly) singular pseudomanifold $M_\Sigma$ with two strata: an open nonsingular stratum $\mathring M$ (a smooth open manifold) and a closed stratum $\beta M$ (a closed manifold of…
Using recent work of Bettiol, we show that a first-order conformal deformation of Wilking's metric of almost-positive sectional curvature on $S^2\times S^3$ yields a family of metrics with strictly positive average of sectional curvatures…