Poincaré duality and periodicity. II: James periodicity (Q711660)

This paper is concerned with conditions on a connected finite complex, \(K\), for some iterated suspension \(\Sigma^j K\) to be a spine, that is, attaching a cell to \(\Sigma^j K\) suitably results in a space satisfying Poincaré duality. If \(K\) itself is the spine of a Poincaré duality complex whose top cell falls off after \(l \geq 2\) suspensions, then \(\Sigma^jK\) is again a spine, where \(j = 2^{\phi(l-1)}\) with \(\phi\) denoting the Adams number. The authors discuss the relationship with surgery theory. They introduce the notion of quadratic duality and show that there is a \(j > 0\) such that \(\Sigma^jK\) is a spine if \(K\) is quadratically self dual. As corollaries the authors obtain periodicity results, where a connected finite complex, \(K\), is \(j\)-periodic if there are \(i, j\), such that \(\Sigma^{c+ij}K\) is a spine. The proofs of the main results use a criterion for Poincaré duality, James periodicity and a generalised Whitehead product.