Nilpotent aspherical Sasakian manifolds (Q6630552)

Recall that an aspherical manifold is a manifold whose homotopy groups besides the fundamental group are trivial and a manifold is called nilpotent if its fundamental group is nilpotent. The aim of this paper is to study the existence of Sasakian structures on compact aspherical manifolds with nilpotent fundamental group. Among all aspherical smooth manifolds with nilpotent fundamental group the most studied class is the class of nilmanifolds. A nilmanifold is a compact quotient of a nilpotent Lie group by a discrete subgroup with the smooth structure inherited from the Lie group. It is known that a compact aspherical nilpotent manifold is homotopy equivalent to a nilmanifold. \N\NThe authors show that every compact aspherical Sasakian manifold with nilpotent fundamental group is diffeomorphic to a Heisenberg nilmanifold. The main result obtained in this paper can be stated as follows: If \(M^{2n+1}\) is a compact aspherical Sasakian manifold with nilpotent fundamental group, then \(M\) is diffeomorphic to a Heisenberg nilmanifold \(\Gamma\backslash H(1,n)\), where \(\Gamma\) is a lattice in \(H(1,n)\) isomorphic to \(\pi_1(M)\). Moreover, there is a second type deformation of a left-invariant normal almost contact structure on \(\Gamma\backslash H(1,n)\), such that \(M\) and \(\Gamma\backslash H(1,n)\) are isomorphic as normal almost contact manifolds. Equivalently, the above result can be stated as the non-existence of compact Sasakian exotic nilmanifolds. This result can be seen as an odd-dimensional version of [\textit{O. Baues} and \textit{V. Cortés}, Geom. Dedicata 122, 215--229 (2006; Zbl 1128.53043); \textit{B. Hajduk} and \textit{A. Tralle}, Geom. Dedicata 132, 31--42 (2008; Zbl 1136.53059)], where it was shown that every compact Kähler aspherical nilmanifold is biholomorphic to a complex torus. As a corollary, the authors show that if \(M^{2n+1}\) is a compact aspherical Sasakian manifold with (virtually) solvable fundamental group, then \(M\) is diffeomorphic to a finite quotient of a Heisenberg nilmanifold. The main result and the similar one for the Kähler case provide evidence that exotic nilmanifolds do not admit as rigid geometric structures as nilmanifolds. \N\NThe paper is organized as follows : Section 1 is an introduction to the subject and summarizes the main results. Section 2 contains the necessary preliminaries about Sasakian manifolds, Sullivan CDGAs, and nilmanifolds. In Section 3, the authors prove a rather general result on maps from a manifold onto its aspherical nilpotent approximations. In Section 4, they discuss Tievsky models for compact Sasakian manifolds, and establish the existence of a quasi-isomorphism whose image lies in the first Tievsky model of \(M\). In the final section, they complete the proof of the main result discussed above.