Failure of Ordinary TQFTs to Distinguish Homotopy Type

Abstract

Work by David Reutter and Christopher Schommer-Pries has shown that ordinary smooth TQFTs can distinguish (stable) diffeomorphism classes of closed, connected, even-dimensional manifolds subject to certain finiteness conditions. In particular, simply connected, closed, smooth 6-manifolds with finite $π_2$ are diffeomorphic if and only if they cannot be distinguished by ordinary TQFTs. The question of whether or not this result holds for all simply connected closed 6-manifolds was open. We consider TQFTs out of the topological and smooth bordism categories, as well as out of a new bordism category constructed in this paper called the formally smooth (FS) bordism category. We present a pair of simply connected closed 6-manifolds with infinite $π_2$ that are not homotopy equivalent, yet are indistinguishable by ordinary TQFTs in all three categories. We extend this counter-example to show that ordinary TQFTs cannot distinguish the homotopy type of simply connected closed manifolds in all dimensions greater than or equal to 6 and non-simply connected closed 5-manifolds. We show that our class of counter-example pairs is spinnable and present a non-spinnable class of counter-examples by introducing a $\mathbb{C}P^2$ connected summand. Lastly, we use more highly connected analogues of our counter-examples to show that, for all $n\geq2$ and $m\geq 2n$, there is a pair of $(2n-1)$-connected closed $(4n+m)$-manifolds that are not homotopy equivalent, yet cannot be distinguished by ordinary TQFTs.