A Study of topology of the Flip Stiefel Manifolds

Abstract

A well known quotient of the real Stiefel manifold is the projective Stiefel manifold. We introduce a new family of quotients of the real Stiefel manifold by cyclic group of order 2 whose action is induced by simultaneous pairwise flipping of the coordinates. We obtain a description for their tangent bundles, compute their mod 2 cohomology and compute Stiefel Whitney classes of these manifolds. We use these to give applications to their stable span, parallelizability and equivariant maps, and the associated results in topological combinatorics.