Small covers, infra-solvmanifolds and curvature

Abstract

AbstractIt is shown that a small cover (resp. real moment-angle manifold) over a simple polytope is an infra-solvmanifold if and only if it is diffeomorphic to a real Bott manifold (resp. flat torus). Moreover, we obtain several equivalent conditions for a small cover to be homeomorphic to a real Bott manifold. In addition, we study Riemannian metrics on small covers and real moment-angle manifolds with certain conditions on the Ricci or sectional curvature. We will see that these curvature conditions put very strong restrictions on the topology of the corresponding small covers and real moment-angle manifolds and the combinatorial structures of the underlying simple polytopes.