Highly connected 7-manifolds, the linking form and non-negative curvature

Abstract

In a recent article, the authors constructed a six-parameter family of highly connected 7-manifolds which admit an SO(3)-invariant metric of non-negative sectional curvature. Each member of this family is the total space of a Seifert fibration with generic fibre $S^3$ and, in particular, has the cohomology ring of an $S^3$-bundle over $S^4$. In the present article, the linking form of these manifolds is computed and used to demonstrate that the family contains infinitely many manifolds which are not even homotopy equivalent to an $S^3$-bundle over $S^4$, the first time that any such spaces have been shown to admit non-negative sectional curvature.