Abstract
We give a simple criterion for a pointwise curvature condition to be stable under surgery. Namely, a curvature condition C, which is understood to be an open, convex, \({{\mathrm{O}}}(n)\)-invariant cone in the space of algebraic curvature operators, is stable under surgeries of codimension at least c provided it contains the curvature operator corresponding to \(S^{c-1} \times \mathbb {R}^{n-c+1}\), \(c \ge 3\). This is used to generalize the well-known classification result of positive scalar curvature in the simply-connected case in the following way: Any simply-connected manifold \(M^n\), \(n \ge 5\), which is either spin with vanishing \(\alpha \)-invariant or else is non-spin admits for any \(\epsilon > 0\) a metric such that the curvature operator satisfies \(R > - \epsilon \left\| R\right\| \).
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Burkhard Wilking for his support during the preparation of this work, which contains the results of the author’s Ph.D. thesis [8].
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The author was supported by SFB 878.
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Hoelzel, S. Surgery stable curvature conditions. Math. Ann. 365, 13–47 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00208-015-1265-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00208-015-1265-1