Manifolds homotopy equivalent to certain torus bundles over lens spaces

Abstract

We compute the topological simple structure set of closed manifolds which occur as total spaces of flat bundles over lens spaces S^l/(Z/p) with fiber an n-dimensjional torus T^n for an odd prime p and l greater or equal to 3, provided that the induced Z/p-action on pi_1(T^n) = Z^n is free outside the origin. To the best of our knowledge this is the first computation of the structure set of a topological manifold whose fundamental group is not obtained from torsionfree and finite groups using amalgamated and HNN-extensions. We give a collection of classical surgery invariants such as splitting obstructions and rho-invariants which decide whether a simple homotopy equivalence from a closed topological manifold to M is homotopic to a homeomorphism.

40 pages, to appear in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics