The ideal-valued index for a dihedral group action, and mass partition by two hyperplanes (Q554387)

The authors compute the complete Fadell-Husseini index of the 8 element dihedral group \(D_8\) acting on \(S^d \times S^d\), both for \(\mathbb F_2\) and for integer coefficients. This establishes the complete cohomological lower bounds for the two hyperplane case of Grünbaum's 1960 mass partition problem: For which \(d\) and \(j\) can any \(j\) arbitrary measures be cut into four equal parts each by two suitably-chosen hyperplanes in \(\mathbb R^d\)? In both cases, they find that the ideal bounds are not stronger than previously established bounds based on one of the maximal abelian subgroups of \(D_8\).