Exotic spheres and chirality (Ex)
From Manifold Atlas
Recall that
denotes the group of h-cobordism classes of manifolds
which are homotopy equivalent to the
-sphere. For
this is the same as the group of oriented diffeomorphism classes of such manifolds.
Exercise 0.1.
Let
a homotopy
-sphere with
. Show that
admits an orientation reversing diffeomorphism if and only if
defines and element of order two in
.
As a consequence, show that the boundary of the
-dimensional E_8-manifold does not admit an orientation reversing diffeomorphism.
Remark 0.2. Note that manifolds admitting no orientation reversing diffeomorphism are often called chiral.