Extending Gromov's optimal systolic inequality

Abstract

The existence of nontrivial cup products or Massey products in the cohomology of a manifold leads to inequalities of systolic type, but in general such inequalities are not optimal (tight). Gromov proved an {optimal} systolic inequality for complex projective space. We provide a natural extension of Gromov's inequality to manifolds whose fundamental cohomology class is a cup product of 2-dimensional classes.