Einstein metrics on rational homology 7-spheres (Q1863987)

In former work, the authors studied Sasakian-Einstein manifolds and provided a lot of new examples of compact regular and non-regular 5-dimensional Sasakian-Einstein spaces. This work is based on and extends some work of Demailly-Kolář and Johnson-Kolář on the existence of Kähler-Einstein metrics on compact Fano orbifolds. In the present paper they continue their construction of examples of compact Einstein spaces along the same lines and focus on 7-dimensional Sasakian-Einstein spaces. In particular they are interested in the case of rational homology 7-spheres. Based on the same work, they provide 1936 distinct Sasakian-Einstein structures on certain 2-connected 7-manifolds \(M^7\) realized as links of weighted homogeneous polynomials in \(\mathbb{C}^5\). Among them they discovered 184 2-connected rational homology spheres and discuss some of these examples in more detail. Here it should be noted that before, \(S^{2n+1}\), the Stiefel manifold \(V_2(\mathbb{R}^{2n+1})\) of 2-frames in \(\mathbb{R}^{2n+1}\) and the 3-Sasakian homogeneous 11-manifold \(G_2/\text{Sp}(1)\) were the only examples, known to the authors, of simply-connected rational homology spheres that admit Sasakian-Einstein structures. Furthermore, the authors discuss 5- and 7-dimensional homology spheres which can be equipped with a regular positive Sasakian structure and finally, determine all rational homology spheres \(M^{2n+1}\) admitting a homogeneous Sasakian-Einstein structure or in particular, a 3-Sasakian homogeneous structure.