An invitation to circle actions (Q1620855)

The Petrie conjecture says that if a manifold \(M\) is homotopically equivalent to a complex projective space and admits a circle action, then its Pontryagin classes must agree with those of \(C\mathbb{P}^n\). The authors of this paper explore this question in the case where the manifold \(M\) is compact and symplectic, and when the fixed point set of the circle map \(S^1\times M\to M\) is non-empty and discrete. The authors provide a collection of related previous results, many of which are due to them and published with proofs elsewhere. They prove a symplectic version of the Petrie conjecture in certain cases, where the dimension of the manifold is 4, 6 or 8 and the number of fixed points is minimal. The symplectic Petrie conjecture is as follows: if a symplectic manifold \((M,\omega)\) satisfying \(H^{2i}(M,\mathbb{R})= H^{2i}(C\mathbb{P}^n,\mathbb{R})\) for all \(i\) admits a Hamiltonian circle action, then \[ H^j(M,\mathbb{Z})= H^j(C\mathbb{P}^n,\mathbb{Z})\qquad \text{for all }j. \] Moreover, the total Chern class \(c (TM)\) is completely determined by the cohomology ring \(H^*(M,\mathbb{Z})\). The key part of the authors' work is the construction of an algorithm that determines the possible representations at the fixed points of the Hamiltonian circle actions with discrete field point sets. The authors also obtain lower bound and divisibility results for the number of fixed points when the manifold is almost complex. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1396.00017].