Farrell-Jones spheres and inertia groups of complex projective spaces (Q494986)

The author defines a new class of homotopy spheres called Farrell--Jones spheres. A homotopy sphere \(\Sigma^{2n}\) is called a Farrell--Jones sphere if the canonical map from \(\mathbb{C}P^n\#\Sigma^{2n}\) to \(\mathbb{C}P^n\) is not concordant to the identity map of \(\mathbb{C}P^n\). The author shows that this is the case if and only if these two manifolds are not diffeomorphic. Furthermore, he proves that the non-zero element of the group of homotopy spheres \(\Theta_m\) for \(m=14\) or \(16\) is a Farrell--Jones sphere. Using a modified version of \textit{F. T. Farrell} and \textit{L. E. Jones} [Invent. Math. 117, No. 1, 57--74 (1994; Zbl 0804.53055), Theorem 3.20] this is used to construct examples of negatively curved closed manifolds \(M, N\) in these dimensions such that \(M\) is a complex hyperbolic manifold, \(N\) has sectional curvature in \([-4-\epsilon,-1+\epsilon]\) and \(M\) and \(N\) are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. This gives a partial answer to a question raised by \textit{C. S. Aravinda} and \textit{F. T. Farrell} [J. Differ. Geom. 63, No. 1, 41--62 (2003; Zbl 1072.53012)]. Another source for Farrell--Jones spheres are Hitchin spheres. Namely, every Hitchin sphere of dimension \(8n+2\) is a Farrell--Jones sphere.