Regular homotopy classes of immersions of 3-manifolds into 5-space (Q697394)

W.-T. Wu proved, in 1964, the following results on immersions of closed orientable smooth manifolds \(M^3\) into 5-space: (1) The normal class of an immersion \(f\) of \(M\) into \(\mathbb{R}^5\) is of the form \(2c(f)\) for some \(c(f)\in H^2(M;\mathbb{Z})\). The element \(c(f)\) is called the Wu invariant of \(f\). (2) There exists a bijection between \(\text{Imm}[M,\mathbb{R}^5]_0\), the regular homotopy set of immersions of \(M\) into 5-space with trivial normal bundles, and \(\Gamma_2(M)\times H^3(M;\mathbb{Z})(=\mathbb{Z})\). Here \(\Gamma_2(M)=\{c\in H^2(M;\mathbb{Z})|2c=0\}\). In this paper, the authors give two geometric meanings of the bijection in (2) above. The one is as follows: The cardinality of \(\Gamma_2(M)\) is written by \(2^{\alpha (M)}\). For an immersion \(f:M\to\mathbb{R}^5\) with trivial normal bundle, let \(W\) be a compact 4-manifold with boundary \(M\) and \(\widetilde{f}:W\to \mathbb{R}^5\) a generic map nonsingular near the boundary such that \(\widetilde{f}|M=f\). Denote the algebraic number of cusps of \(\widetilde{f}\) by \(\#\Sigma^{1,1}(\widetilde{f})\). Define \(i_a(f)=(3\sigma (W)-3\alpha (M)+\#\Sigma^{1,1}(\widetilde{f}))/2\). Then \((c,i_a):\text{Imm}[M,\mathbb{R}^5]_0\to \Gamma_2(M)\times \mathbb{Z}\) is a bijection. As a corollary, the authors prove that two embeddings of closed orientable 3-manifolds \(M\) into 5-space with no 2-torsion in the second cohomology are regularly homotopic if and only if their Seifert surfaces have the same signature. As in (1) above, they show that for any \(c\in H^2(M^3;\mathbb{Z})\), there exists an embedding of \(M\) into 5-space with Wu invariant \(c\). They also give two embeddings \(f_0,f_8\) of the 3-torus into 5-space with the following interesting properties: (i)\(f_0\# h\) is regularly homotopic to \(f_8\) for some immersion \(h:S^3\to\mathbb{R}^5\), and (ii) the immersion above cannot be regularly homotopic to an embedding.