Orientation reversal of manifolds

Daniel Müllner

Published 2009-07-30, updated 2010-12-17Version 2

We call a closed, connected, orientable manifold in one of the categories TOP, PL or DIFF chiral if it does not admit an orientation-reversing automorphism and amphicheiral otherwise. Moreover, we call a manifold strongly chiral if it does not admit a self-map of degree -1. We prove that there are strongly chiral, smooth manifolds in every oriented bordism class in every dimension greater than two. We also produce simply-connected, strongly chiral manifolds in every dimension greater than six. For every positive integer k, we exhibit lens spaces with an orientation-reversing self-diffeomorphism of order 2^k but no self-map of degree -1 of smaller order.