The generalized Chern conjecture for manifolds that are locally a product of surfaces (Q639560)

A closed manifold is said to be flat if the tangent bundle admits a connection with zero curvature; the structure group is then given by a representation of the fundamental group. \textit{J. W. Milnor} [Comment. Math. Helv. 32, 215--223 (1958; Zbl 0196.25101] conjectured the Euler characteristic was an obstruction to the existence of a flat structure. \textit{J. Smillie} [Comment. Math. Helv. 52, 453--455 (1977; Zbl 0357.53021)] provided a counterexample to the conjecture as stated above and the conjecture is now formulated as ``A closed aspherical manifold with non-zero Euler characteristic does not admit a flat structure''. The authors show: Theorem 1.2: Let \(M\) be a closed oriented manifold admitting a Riemannian structure with respect to which the universal cover is a direct product of 2-dimensional symmetric spaces. If \(\chi(M)\neq 0\), then \(M\) admits no flat structure. This establishes the Chern conjecture (that closed affine manifolds have zero Euler characteristic) in those cases. The proof uses a new sharp Milnor-Wood inequality for Riemannian manifolds that are locally a product of hyperbolic planes. The authors study the possible flat vector bundles over such manifolds and show over closed Hilbert-Blumenthal modular varieties that there are finitely many flat structures with non-zero Euler number and that none of them corresponds to the tangent bundle.