Exotic torus manifolds and equivariant smooth structures on quasitoric manifolds (Q1944813)

A torus manifold is a \(2n\)-dimensional closed connected smooth manifold with an effective action of an \(n\)-dimensional real torus \(T^n\) that has fixed points. The main results of this paper concern the classification of torus manifolds up to different kinds of isomorphism, namely (equivariant) diffeomorphism, homeomorphism, homotopy equivalence and isomorphism of integer cohomology. The author shows that none of these classes coincide, by constructing examples of torus manifolds with isomorphic cohomology ring which are not homotopy equivalent, examples of equivariantly homotopy equivalent ones which are not homeomorphic, and equivariantly homeomorphic ones which are not diffeomorphic. The examples constructed are all of the following type: consider on the one hand a simple torus manifold \(M\), such as the sphere \(S^{2n}\) with the standard \(T^n\)-action, and on the other hand the \(T^n\)-space \(T^n\times X\), where \(X\) is some \(n\)-dimensional manifold. Remove tubular neighborhoods of a regular orbit in \(M\) and of an orbit in \(T^n\times X\), and glue the remainders along the boundary. In this way, the author obtains a torus manifold \(\alpha(M,X)\), and he shows in examples that by replacing \(X\) by a manifold \(Y\) which is isomorphic in one sense, but not isomorphic in another, e.g., \(X={\mathbb C} P^n\) and \(Y\) a homotopy \({\mathbb C} P^n\), he can obtain pairs of torus manifolds with the desired properties. It turns out that in low dimensions such examples can not always be constructed. The author proves that \(6\)-dimensional torus manifolds are equivariantly diffeomorphic if and only if they are equivariantly homeomorphic. In the last part of the paper, conjugacy classes of \(n\)-dimensional tori in the diffeomorphism group of a \(2n\)-dimensional torus manifold \(M\) are considered. He shows that for \(2n\geq 8\), there always exist infinitly many, whereas for \(2n=6\), the number can be infinite, \(1\), or an arbitrarily large number; the case of dimension \(6\) relies on results of \textit{P.~Melvin} [Math. Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. 91, 305--314 (1982; Zbl 0486.57016)] who treated the case \(2n=4\).