Cubes and Generalized Real Bott Manifolds

Abstract

We define a notion of facets-pairing structure and its seal space on a nice manifold with corners. We will study facets-pairing structures on any cube in detail and investigate when the seal space of a facets-pairing structure on a cube is a closed manifold. In particular, for any binary square matrix $A$ with zero diagonal in dimension n, there is a canonical facets-pairing structure $F_A$ on the n-dimensional cube. We will show that all the closed manifolds that we can obtain from the seal spaces of such $F_A$'s are neither more nor less than all the generalized real Bott manifolds --- a special class of real toric manifolds introduced by Choi, Masuda and Suh.