Rational homotopy and simply-connected 8-manifolds

Abstract

We introduce a rational homotopy invariant P of a topological space, which is a quintic tensor on the cohomology. For n > 1, formality of a closed (n-1)-connected manifold of dimension up to 5n-2 is equivalent to vanishing of P and the Bianchi-Massey tensor introduced by Crowley and the second author arXiv:1505.04184. We show also that elements of the group of closed simply-connected spin 8-manifolds with the cohomology of an r-fold connected sum of S^2 x S^6 are determined up to torsion by the value of P.