A remark on almost-quaternion substructures on the sphere (Q793407)

An almost-quaternion k-substructure on an oriented n-manifold is a reduction of the structural group of its tangent bundle from SO(n) to Sp(k)\(\times SO(n-4k)\). \textit{T. Önder} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 86, 535- 540 (1982; Zbl 0507.55016)] solved the existence problem of almost- quaternion k-substructures on the n-sphere \(S^ n\) for all n and k except for n (\(\equiv 1 mod 4)\geq 5\) and \(k=(n-1)/4\). The purpose of the paper is to show that for this exceptional case \(S^ n\) has an almost- quaternion k-substructure if and only if \(n=5\). The result follows from investigating homotopy exact sequences of certain fibrations. By another method Önder also has proved the same result [ibid. 90, 155-156 (1984)].