Obstruction theory on 7-manifolds (Q2004020)

It is a classical problem in topology to determine obstructions for reducing the structure group of a vector bundle. The authors continue their study of such problems in the context of manifolds of dimension 6 or 7. In this paper the authors consider a connected, closed, smooth \(\text{spin}^c\)-manifold of dimension 6 or 7 and \(m\)-dimensional vector bundles \(\xi\) over \(M\) admitting a \(\text{spin}^c\)-structure. For various homomorphisms \(\rho: G \rightarrow \text{SO}(m)\) the authors consider the problem of reducing the structure group of \(\xi\) from \(\text{SO}(m)\) to \(G\) using the representation \(\rho\). The goal is to obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for such a reduction depending on the cohomology of \(M\) and the characteristic classes of the vector bundle \(\xi\). The following is the main result of the paper (Theorem 1.1 in the paper): \textbf{Theorem 1.1} Let \(\xi\) be a 7-dimensional vector bundle with \(w_1(\xi) = 0\) and \(w_2(\xi) = 0\) over a 7-dimensional spin manifold \(M\). Then the structure group of \(\xi\) reduces from \(\text{Spin}(7)\) to \(\text{Sp}(1)\) through \(\rho\) if and only if the spin characteristic class \(q_1(\xi) \in H^4(M;\mathbb{Z})\) is divisible by (i) 0, (ii) 1, (iii) 2, (iv) 3, (v) 4, (vi) 10, (vii) 28. A nice corollary of this theorem is the statement that for any 7-dimensional spin vector bundle \(\xi\) over a spin 7-manifold the structure group of the 8-dimensional bundle, \(\mathbb{R}\oplus \xi\) reduces to \(G_2\) since the vector bundle admits the structure of a bundle of Cayley algebras.