(Filtered) cohomological rigidity of Bott towers

Abstract

A Bott tower is an iterated $\CP ^1$-bundle over a point, where each $\CP ^1$-bundle is the projectivization of a rank $2$ decomposable complex vector bundle. For a Bott tower, the filtered cohomology is naturally defined. We show that isomorphism classes of Bott towers are distinguished by their filtered cohomology rings. We even show that any filtered cohomology ring isomorphism between two Bott towers is induced by an isomorphism of the Bott towers.