Higher dimensional Möbius bands and their boundaries (Q2313938)

The main goal of the paper is to give the following characterisation of Bieberbach manifolds which are geodesic boundaries of a compact flat manifold: Theorem 2.3. For a Bieberbach manifold \(\mathbb{R}^{n-1}/\Gamma_0\) the following properties are equivalent. \begin{itemize} \item[(i)] It can be realized as the totally geodesic boundary of a compact flat \(n\)-dimensional manifold. \item[(ii)] It admits a fixed-point-free isometric involution. \item[(iii)] There is an exact sequence \[ 1 \rightarrow \Gamma_0 \rightarrow \Gamma \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}_2 \rightarrow 1 \] where \(\Gamma\) is a \((n - 1)\)-dimensional Bieberbach group. \end{itemize} In the sequel the authors discuss more precisely the case of \(n\leq 4\) (see Sections 3, 4 and 5).