Strong inhomogeneity of Eschenburg spaces. Appendix A by Mark Dickinson and the author. (Q1396304)

Eschenburg spaces are biquotients of \(SU(3)\) and provide infinite families of manifolds of dimension 7 admitting inhomogeneous metrics of positive sectional curvature [\textit{J.-H. Eschenburg}, Invent. Math. 66, 469--480 (1982; Zbl 0484.53031)]. A topological space is called strongly inhomogeneous if it is not homotopy equivalent to any compact homogeneous space. J.-H. Eschenburg (ibid.) showed that a biquotient \(M\) (as he defined) with \(H^4(M, {\mathbb Z})={\mathbb Z}_n\) with \(n\equiv 2 \pmod 3\) is strongly inhomogeneous. In the present paper more results on strong inhomogeneity are given. In particular, it is proved that the Eschenburg space \(M_{\overline{a},\overline{b}}^7\) is strongly inhomogeneous if it satisfies one of the following conditions: (i) If \(\sum a_i=\sum b_i \not\equiv 0 \pmod 3\) or (ii) if \(n=| H^4(M_{\overline{a},\overline{b}}^7,\mathbb{Z})| \), then \(3^2\mid n\) or there is a prime \(p\mid n\) such that \(p \equiv2\pmod 3\). For the proof some homotopy invariants are used which were computed independently by \textit{R. J. Milgram} [Ann. Math. Stud. 145, 379--407 (2000; Zbl 0953.57019)] and \textit{B. Kruggel} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 349, 2827--2843 (1997; Zbl 0880.57013)]. In the appendix the homotopy types of a subclass of Eschenburg spaces (the Aloff-Wallach spaces) are studied.