Codimension two souls and cancellation phenomena (Q2018667): Difference between revisions

The authors provide the first examples of closed Riemannian manifolds of nonnegative sectional curvature that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. For example, they show that \(S^7\times \mathbb{C}P^{2m}\) and \(\mathrm{Sp}(2)//\mathrm{Sp}(1)\times \mathbb{C}P^{2m}\) are not diffeomorphic. The argument mixes surgery theory with homotopy-theoretic considerations. The main result is that for each \(m\geq 0\) there exists an open \((4m+9)\)-dimensional simply connected manifold \(N\) admitting complete metrics of nonnegative sectional curvature whose souls are nondiffeomorphic, homeomorphic, and have codimension \(2\).