The finiteness obstruction for loop spaces

Abstract.

For finitely dominated spaces, Wall constructed a finiteness obstruction, which decides whether a space is equivalent to a finite CW-complex or not. It was conjectured that this finiteness obstruction always vanishes for quasi finite H-spaces, that are H-spaces whose homology looks like the homology of a finite CW-complex. In this paper we prove this conjecture for loop spaces. In particular, this shows that every quasi finite loop space is actually homotopy equivalent to a finite CW-complex.