On the cohomology of torus manifolds (Q854542)

\textit{M. W. Davis} and \textit{T. Januszkiewich} [Duke Math. J. 62, 417--451 (1991; Zbl 0733.52006)] introduced a new class of smooth manifolds which are now known as quasitoric manifolds generalizing the notion of a (smooth) projective toric variety. These are compact even dimensional and are acted on by a torus of half the dimension of the manifold where the action is `locally standard' with orbit space a simple polytope. A smooth closed connected orientable \(2n\)-dimensional manifold \(M\) together with the action of an \(n\)-dimensional torus \(T\) is called a torus manifold if the action is effective and the set of \(T\)-fixed points is non-empty. The orbit space \(Q\) is then a manifold with corners. The authors generalize to the class of torus manifolds many results of Davis and Januszkiewich for quasi toric manifolds. One of the motivations is that smooth complete toric varieties are examples of torus manifolds while in general they are not quasitoric. As in the case of quasitoric manifolds, one has the notion of characteristic submanifolds, which are of codimension \(2\) and arise as connected components of submanifolds (of codimension \(2\)) fixed by circle subgroups \(T\). The interplay between the topology of \(M\) and the combinatorics of \(Q\) is shown to be strikingly parallel to that between a quasitoric manifolds and the corresponding simple polytope. We outline the major results of the paper. Theorem 4.1 states that the \(T\) action on a torus manifold \(M\) is locally standard if all its odd dimensional cohomology groups vanish. It is shown in Lemma 4.5 that when the action is locally standard, and \(H^2(Q)=0\), \(M\) can be reconstructed as the `canonical model' \(M_\Lambda(P)\) from the orbit space \(Q\) and a map \(\Lambda\) -- which is the analogue of the characteristic map in the context of quasitoric manifolds -- from the set of facets of \(Q\) to \(Hom(S^1,T)\). The notion of face ring \(k[Q]\) over a commutative ring \(k\) of a `nice manifold with corners' \(Q\) is defined. It is shown that the \(T\)-equivariant cohomology of \(M\) is isomorphic to \(\mathbb{Z}[Q]\) if the (ordinary) cohomology of \(M\) vanishes in odd degrees. In this case, it is deduced that \(\mathbb{Z}[Q]\) is Cohen-Macaulay. (Actually this is a corollary of a more general result obtained in the paper.) The paper ends with proof of a particular case of Stanley's conjecture on Gorenstein\(^*\) simplicial posets. The paper is carefully written with many illustrative examples.