Orientation reversal of manifolds (Q1048469)

A manifold is called chiral if it does not admit an orientation-reversing automorphism and amphicheiral otherwise. Moreover, it is called strongly chiral if it does not admit a self map of degree \(-1\). The work under review studies a large class of manifolds with respect to those properties in the context of TOP, PL or DIFF. The main results are: Theorem A: In every dimension \(\geq 3,\) every closed, smooth, oriented manifold is oriented bordant to a connected manifold of this type which is smoothly chiral. Theorem B: In dimension \(3\), \(5\) and \(6\), every simply-connected, closed, smooth manifold is smoothly amphicheiral. The analogous statements hold in the topological and the PL-category. A simply-connected, closed, topological \(4\)-manifold is topologically amphicheiral if its signature is zero. If the signature is nonzero, the manifold is even strongly chiral. A map has order \(k\) if the composite \((f\circ f\circ \cdots \circ f)\) (\(k\)-times) is the identity. Theorem C: For every positive integer \(k\), there are infinitely many lens spaces which admit an orientation-reversing diffeomorphism of order \(2^k\) but no self-map of degree \(-1\) of smaller order. The author constructs some special manifolds which have the properties in question. These examples are basically certain torus bundles over the circle \(S^1\) and some \(4\)-dimensional manifolds using surgery. Then some standard constructions are peformed with the former manifolds and lens spaces to construct new ones. The paper is well organized and one section gives a good summary of the known results and of invariants used for this kind of problem.