Germs of fibrations of spheres by great circles always extend to the whole sphere (Q1747128)

In the present paper, fibrations \(F\) of the unit sphere \(S^{2n+1}\) by oriented great circles are considered. All fibrations are fiber bundles. An oriented great circle \(P\) spans an oriented \(2\)-plane through the origin in \(\mathbb{R}^{2n+2}\), which is also denoted by \(P\) and thus it appears as a single point in the Grassmann manifold \(G_{2}\mathbb{R}^{2n+2}\) of all such oriented \(2\)-planes. The base space \(M_{F}\) of \(F\) appears as a smooth \(2n\)-dimensional submanifold of \(G_{2}\mathbb{R}^{2n+2}\) provided that \(F\) is smooth. The tangent space of \(M_{F}\) at \(P\) is denoted by \(T_{P}M_{F}\) and is a \(2n\)-plane. A germ of a fibration of \(S^{2n+1}\) by oriented great circles consists of such a fibration in an open neighborhood of a given fiber \(P\), with two germs equivalent if they agree on some smaller neighborhood of \(P.\) To extend such a germ to a fibration of \(S^{2n+1}\) means to find a fibration of \(S^{2n+1}\) which agrees with the given germ on some neighborhood of \(P\). The main theorem of the paper is the following result, which was previously known only in dimension three: Every germ of a smooth fibration of \(S^{2n+1}\) by oriented great circles extends to such a fibration of all of \(S^{2n+1}\). The crucial tool for proving the theorem above is the following result also previously known in dimension three: The space \(\{T_{P}M_{F}\}\) of tangent \(2n\)-planes at \(P\) to the base spaces \(M_{F}\) of all smooth oriented great circle fibrations \(F\) of \(S^{2n+1}\) containing \(P\) deformation retracts to its subspace \(\{T_{P}M_{H}\}\) of tangent \(2n\)-planes to such Hopf fibrations \(H\) of \(S^{2n+1}\).