The stable parallelizability of a smooth homotopy lens space (Q1113143)

This paper is concerned with lens spaces (i.e. orbit spaces of homotopy spheres under a free cyclic group action of prime order) that are stably parallelizable (i.e. have stably trivial tangent bundles). It is shown that a free \({\mathbb{Z}}_ p\)-action on a homotopy sphere \(\Sigma_ a\) can be described in terms of a set \(b=\{b_ j\), \(j=1,2,...,n+m\}\) of natural numbers. The resulting lens space \(\Sigma_ a/{\mathbb{Z}}_ p\) is denoted by L(p;a;b). Besides various examples, two main results are: Theorem: A lens space L(p;a;b) is stably parallelizable iff \(n\leq p\) and \(b_ 1^{2j}+b_ 2^{2j}+...+b^{2j}_{n+m}=m(mod p)\) for \(j=1,2,...,[(n-1)].\) Theorem: There exists a stably parallelizable (2n- 1)-dimensional lens space L(p;a;b) iff \(n\leq p\).