Small covers and quasitoric manifolds over neighborly polytopes (Q2117377)

Quasitoric manifolds and their real analogues appeared in the 1991 seminal paper of \textit{M. W. Davis} and \textit{T. Januszkiewicz} [Duke Math. J. 62, No. 2, 417--451 (1991; Zbl 0733.52006)], as a topological generalisation of non-singular projective toric varieties and real toric varieties. The manifolds have a locally standard \(\mathbb Z_2^n\) action in the case of small covers and \((S^1)^n\) in the case of quasitoric manifolds, such that the orbit space of the action is identified with a simple polytope as a manifold with corners. In the present paper the authors prove that the duals of neighborly simplicial \(n\)-polytopes with the number of vertices greater than \(2^{\lceil\frac{n}{2}\rceil+2} + [\frac{n}{2}]-3\) cannot appear as the orbit spaces of a small cover for all \(n\in \mathbb N\). In dimension 2 and 3 every simple polytope is the orbit space for a quasitoric manifold, but in dimensions larger than 3 our knowledge is still limited to some particular classes of polytopes and examples. Therefore, the authors focus on the study of small covers over the duals of neighborly simplicial polytopes with small number of vertices in dimensions 4, 5, 6 and 7 and obtain, in most considered cases (small covers over neighborly simple 4-polytopes with up to 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 facets, neighborly simple 5-polytopes with up 9 facets and neighborly simple 6-polytopes with 10 facets), their complete classification. They also study relations between small covers and corresponding quasitoric manifolds by verifying that the Lifting conjecture (Let \(P\) be a simple polytope and let \(M^n\) be a small cover over \(P\). Is it true that there is a quasitoric manifold \(M^{2n}\) such that \(M^n\) is the fixed point set of the conjugation on \(M^{2n}\)?) for small covers is true for all of them and partially answer some rigidity questions.