Extending smooth cyclic group actions on the Poincaré homology sphere (Q5963066)

The author studies smooth actions of the cyclic group \(\mathbb{Z}_p\) for a prime \(p > 5\) on a compact simply connected manifold \(X\) with boundary the Poincaré homology 3-sphere \(\Sigma(2,3,5)\) with negatively definite intersection form \(E_8\). He assumes that the action is an extension of a free action on \(\Sigma(2,3,5)\) and studies the isotropy action of this group in the tangent space \(T_xX\) of an isolated point \(x \in X\). The first result is that the rotation numbers \((a,b)\) of the isotropy representation satisfy the conditions \(a + b \equiv \pm 1 \pmod{p}\) or \(a+b \equiv \pm 7 \pmod{p}\). Using the Atiyah-Patody-Singer \(G\)-signature formula for manifolds with boundary, he proves that a free \(\mathbb{Z}_7\) action on \(\Sigma(2,3,5)\) does not extend to a smooth homologically trivial action on \(X\) which has only isolated fixed points. As a consequence, he proves that the 4-manifold \(\sharp^8 S^2 \times S^2\) with a smooth homologically trivial action of \(\mathbb{Z}_7\) with only isolated fixed points does not contain an equivariant embedding of \(\Sigma(2,3,5)\) with a free action. The approach is based on investigation of the equivariant Yang-Mills instanton-one moduli space for cylindrical-end 4-manifolds.