Equivariantly homeomorphic quasitoric manifolds are diffeomorphic. Dedicated to the memory of Samuel Gitler (Q2398345)

A quasitoric manifold is a torus manifold whose orbit space has the structure of a polytope, where a torus manifold is a smooth even dimensional manifold with an action of the half dimensional torus with non-empty set of fixed points. In the paper under review, the author shows that if two quasitoric manifolds are equivariantly homeomorphic then they are diffeomorphic. It is also useful to recall the previous work of the author. He showed in his previous paper [Math. Z. 273, No. 3--4, 1063--1084 (2013; Zbl 1269.57014)] that the following two conditions are equivalent: (1) there exist two quasitoric manifolds \(M_{1}\), \(M_{2}\) such that \(M_{1}\) and \(M_{2}\) are equivariantly homeomorphic but not equivariantly diffeomorphic; (2) there are exotic smooth structures on the \(4\)-dimensional sphere. In other words the equivariant smooth structure of quasitoric manifolds is unique if and only if the smooth Poincaré conjecture holds. Therefore, it should be emphasized that the main result might not be true for ``equivariantly'' diffeomorphic. Moreover, the author shows that for quasitoric manifolds over polytopes such that the intersection of any two facets is non-empty, the diffeomorphism types are determined up to finite ambiguity by the cohomology ring and the first Pontrjagin classes. Cf. the classical theorem by Sullivan stating that the diffeomorphism types of manifolds are determined up to finite ambiguity by their cohomology ring and the characteristic classes (not only the first Pontrjagin class).