Properties of Bott manifolds and cohomological rigidity (Q2431286)

The cohomology rigidity problem for toric manifolds asks whether two toric manifolds with isomorphic integral cohomology rings are homeomorphic, that is, if the integral cohomology ring of a toric manifold uniquely determines it topological type. A (complex) Bott tower \(\{B_j \mid j=0,\dots,n\}\) of height \(N\) is a sequence \[ B_n\overset{\pi_{n}}{\to} B_{n-1}\overset{\pi_{n-1}}{\to}\dots\overset{\pi_2}{\to}B_1\overset{\pi_1}{\to}B_0 \] of manifolds \(B_j=P(\mathbb C\oplus \xi_{j-1})\), where \(\xi_{j-1}\) is a complex line bundle over \(B_{j-1}\) for each \(j=1,\dots,n\). The twist number of a Bott tower is the number of non-trivial topological fibrations \(\pi_i: B_i\to B_{i-1}\) in the sequence. In this paper, the authors prove that the class of one-twist Bott manifolds is cohomology rigid. They also generalise the result to quasitoric manifolds.