The Stiefel-Whitney classes of moment-angle manifolds are trivial (Q2093085)

Moment-angle complexes play an important role in toric topology. They give examples of interesting torus actions. An important case is when the moment-angle complex constructed is a manifold, smooth or topological. The first result of the paper is that all Stiefel-Whitney classes of moment-angle manifolds are trivial. The result holds for smooth and topological manifolds. The Stiefel-Whitney classes for topological manifolds are defined using a homotopical analogue of Milnor's microbundle or using Wu classes. For the second result, the authors study the real case of moment-angle complexes. For this case, they introduce the equivariant analogue of the Stiefel-Whitney classes for manifolds equipped with a group action. A comparison between the equivariant and the non-equivariant case proves the vanishing of the Stiefel-Whitney classes for real (smooth or topological) moment-angle manifolds. In the next section, they start with a moment-angle complex \(Z_K\) on a simplicial complex \(K\) of dimension \(n - 1\) on the set of \(m\) elements and the \(T^m\) action. For a subtorus \(T\), \(\dim T < m - n\), that acts freely on \(Z_K\), with \(Z_K/T\) a manifold, the authors show that the Stiefel-Whitney numbers vanish and thus \(Z_K/T\) bounds. For the proof, the authors compare once more equivariant and non-equivariant cohomology. At the end of the paper, the authors construct an example of an action of a 2-dimensional subtorus of \(T^9\) on \(Z_{{\partial}C_6(9)}\) such that \(w_2(Z_{{\partial}C_6(9)}/T) \not= 0\).