Spin^h and further generalisations of spin

Abstract

The question of which manifolds are spin or spin^c has a simple and complete answer. In this paper we address the same question for spin^h manifolds, which are less studied but have appeared in geometry and physics in recent decades. We determine that the first obstruction to being spin^h is the fifth integral Stiefel-Whitney class W_5. Moreover, we show that every compact orientable manifold of dimension 7 or lower is spin^h, and that there are orientable manifolds which are not spin^h in all higher dimensions. We are then led to consider an infinite sequence of generalised spin structures. In doing so, we show that there is no integer k such that every manifold embeds in a spin manifold with codimension k.