Systolic freedom of orientable manifolds1 (Q4237658)

This paper describes very general conditions under which certain isosystolic inequalities fail. Say that a compact orientable manifold \(X\) of dimension \(n\) is systolically \((k,n-k)\)-free if \(\inf_g {\text{vol}(g) \over \text{sys}_{n-k}(g) \text{sys}_k(g)} = 0\) where the infimum is taken over all Riemannian metrics on \(X\) and \(\text{sys}_l(g)\) is the \(l\)-dimensional systole of \(g\). The results of the paper can be summarized as follows: (1) If \(n \geq 3\), then \(X\) is systolically \((1,n-1)\)-free. (2) If \(n \geq 5\) and the fundamental group of \(X\) is free abelian, then \(x\) is systolically \((2,n-2)\)-free. (3) If \(X\) is \((k-1)\)-connected and \(k < {n \over 2}\), then \(X\) is systolically \((k,n-k)\)-free if \(k\) is not divisible by \(4\). While if \(k=4\), then \(X\) is systolically \((4,n-4)\)-free provided that the first Pontryagin class of \(X\) is zero.