Local Inertness of Poincaré duality complexes

Abstract

We prove that, under certain homological conditions, the attaching map of the top cell of a Poincaré duality complex is inert when localised away from a finite set of primes. This improves on a result of Félix and Tanré in these cases. As an additional application of the methods, we give a loop space decomposition of simply-connected $6$-dimensional Poincaré duality complexes satisfying certain hypotheses. We also show that, under the hypotheses of the inertness theorem, the $(n-1)$-skeleton of an $n$-dimensional Poincaré duality complex satisfies the hyperbolic form of Moore's Conjecture after localising away from an explicit finite set of primes, and use this to obtain new examples of \(p\)-local maps between spheres that are not inert.

24 pages