Rational analogs of projective planes

Abstract

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.

Accepted for publication by Algebraic & Geometric Topology. Certain computational error corrected in Theorem 3.7