Rational analogs of projective planes

Zhixu Su

Published 2010-10-15, updated 2014-01-17Version 3

In this paper, we study the existence of high-dimensional, closed, smooth manifolds whose rational homotopy type resembles that of a projective plane. Applying rational surgery, the problem can be reduced to finding possible Pontryagin numbers satisfying the Hirzebruch signature formula and a set of congruence relations, which turns out to be equivalent to finding solutions to a system of Diophantine equations.