Dirac operators and symmetries of quasitoric manifolds (Q1938765)

A quasitoric manifold is a smooth closed simply connected \(2n\)-dimensional manifold equipped with a well-behaved action of an \(n\)-dimensional torus such that the orbit space is an \(n\)-dimensional simple polytope. The degree of symmetry \(N(M)\) of a smooth manifold \(M\) is the maximum of the dimensions of the compact Lie groups that act smoothly and effectively on \(M\). In this paper, the author studies symmetries of quasitoric manifolds and gives upper bounds for the degree of symmetry in various situations. The author first establishes a vanishing result for indices of certain twisted Dirac operators on Spin\(^c\)-manifolds having nonabelian Lie group actions. The result is then applied to show that \(N(M)\leq 3n\) for any \(2n\)-dimensional quasitoric manifold whose orbit polytope admits a facet coloring with \(n\) colors. Moreover, the equality holds if and only if \(M\) is the product of \(n\) copies of two-dimensional spheres. The author also shows that the complex projective space \({\mathbb{C}}\)P\(^n\) is the most symmetric \(2n\)-dimensional quasitoric manifold, i.e., that \(N(M)<N({\mathbb{C}}\)P\(^n)=n^2+2n\), for all \(2n\)-dimensional quasitoric manifolds \(M\not={\mathbb{C}}\)P\(^n\).