On fibrations with formal elliptic fibers

Abstract

We prove that for a fibration of simply-connected spaces of finite type $F\hookrightarrow E\to B$ with $F$ being positively elliptic and $H^*(F,\qq)$ not possessing non-trivial derivations of negative degree, the base $B$ is formal if and only if the total space $E$ is formal. Moreover, in this case the fibration map is a formal map. As a geometric application we show that positive quaternion Kähler manifolds are formal and so are their associated twistor fibration maps.

stronger geometric motivation added in the introduction