Geometry & Topology, Vol. 4 (2000) Paper no. 4, pages 149--170.

Double point self-intersection surfaces of immersions

Mohammad A Asadi-Golmankhaneh, Peter J Eccles


Abstract. A self-transverse immersion of a smooth manifold M^{k+2} in R^{2k+2} has a double point self-intersection set which is the image of an immersion of a smooth surface, the double point self-intersection surface. We prove that this surface may have odd Euler characteristic if and only if k is congruent to 1 modulo 4 or k+1 is a power of 2. This corrects a previously published result by Andras Szucs.
The method of proof is to evaluate the Stiefel-Whitney numbers of the double point self-intersection surface. By earier work of the authors these numbers can be read off from the Hurewicz image h(\alpha ) in H_{2k+2}\Omega ^{\infty }\Sigma ^{\infty }MO(k) of the element \alpha in \pi _{2k+2}\Omega ^{\infty }\Sigma ^{\infty }MO(k) corresponding to the immersion under the Pontrjagin-Thom construction.

Keywords. immersion, Hurewicz homomorphism, spherical class, Hopf invariant, Stiefel-Whitney number

AMS subject classification. Primary: 57R42. Secondary: 55R40, 55Q25, 57R75.

DOI: 10.2140/gt.2000.4.149

E-print: arXiv:math.GT/0003236

Submitted to GT on 30 July 1999. Paper accepted 29 February 2000. Paper published 11 March 2000.

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Mohammad A Asadi-Golmankhaneh, Peter J Eccles
Department of Mathematics, University of Urmia
PO Box 165, Urmia, Iran

Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester
Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

Email: pjeccles@man.ac.uk

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