Codimension two souls and cancellation phenomena (Q2018667)

The authors provide the first examples of closed Riemannian manifolds of nonnegative sectional curvature that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. For example, they show that \(S^7\times \mathbb{C}P^{2m}\) and \(\mathrm{Sp}(2)//\mathrm{Sp}(1)\times \mathbb{C}P^{2m}\) are not diffeomorphic. The argument mixes surgery theory with homotopy-theoretic considerations. The main result is that for each \(m\geq 0\) there exists an open \((4m+9)\)-dimensional simply connected manifold \(N\) admitting complete metrics of nonnegative sectional curvature whose souls are nondiffeomorphic, homeomorphic, and have codimension \(2\).