Filtered finiteness of the image of the unstable Hurewicz homomorphism with applications to bordism of immersions

Abstract

AbstractAfter recent work of Hill, Hopkins and Ravenel on the Kervaire invariant one problem [M. A. Hill, M. J. Hopkins and D. C. Ravenel, On the non-existence of elements of Kervaire invariant one, Ann. Math. (2), 184 (2016), 1–262], as well as Adams’ solution of the Hopf invariant one problem [J. F. Adams, On the non-existence of elements of Hopf invariant one, Ann. Math. (2), 72 (1960), 20–104], an immediate consequence of Curtis conjecture is that the set of spherical classes in H∗Q0S0 is finite. Similarly, Eccles conjecture, when specialized to X=Sn with n> 0, together with Adams’ Hopf invariant one theorem, implies that the set of spherical classes in H∗QSn is finite. We prove a filtered version of the above finiteness properties. We show that if X is an arbitrary CW-complex of finite type such that for some n, HiX≃0 for any i>n, then the image of the composition π∗ΩlΣl+2X→π∗QΣ2X→H∗QΣ2X is finite; the finiteness remains valid if we formally replace X with S−1. As an application, we provide a lower bound on the dimension of the sphere of origin on the potential classes of π∗QSn which are detected by homology. We derive a filtered finiteness property for the image of certain transfer maps ΣdimgBG+→QS0 in homology. As an application to bordism theory, we show that for any codimension k framed immersion f:M↬ℝn+k which extends to an embedding M→ℝd×ℝn+k, if n is very large with respect to d and k then the manifold M as well as its self-intersection manifolds are boundaries. Some results of this paper extend results of Hadi [Spherical classes in some finite loop spaces of spheres. Topol. Appl., 224 (2017), 1–18] and offer corrections to some minor computational mistakes, hence providing corrected upper bounds on the dimension of spherical classes H∗ΩlSn+l. All of our results are obtained at the prime p = 2.