Topological rigidity for non-aspherical manifolds

Abstract

The Borel Conjecture predicts that closed aspherical manifolds are topological rigid. We want to investigate when a non-aspherical oriented connected closed manifold M is topological rigid in the following sense. If f: N --> M is an orientation preserving homotopy equivalence with a closed oriented manifold as target, then there is an orientation preserving homeomorphism h: N --> M such that h and f induce up to conjugation the same maps on the fundamental groups. We call such manifolds Borel manifolds. We give partial answers to this questions for S^k x S^d, for sphere bundles over aspherical closed manifolds of dimension less or equal to 3 and for 3-manifolds with torsionfree fundamental groups. We show that this rigidity is inherited under connected sums in dimensions greater or equal to 5. We also classify manifolds of dimension 5 or 6 whose fundamental group is the one of a surface and whose second homotopy group is trivial.