Systolic inequalities and Massey products in simply-connected manifolds

Abstract

We show that the existence of a nontrivial Massey product in the cohomology ring H^*(X) imposes global constraints upon the Riemannian geometry of a manifold X. Namely, we exhibit a suitable systolic inequality, associated to such a product. This generalizes an inequality proved in collaboration with Y. Rudyak, in the case when X has unit Betti numbers, and realizes the next step in M. Gromov's program for obtaining geometric inequalities associated with nontrivial Massey products. The inequality is a volume lower bound, and depends on the metric via a suitable isoperimetric quotient. The proof relies upon W. Banaszczyk's upper bound for the successive minima of a pair of dual lattices. Such an upper bound is applied to the integral lattices in homology and cohomology of X. The possibility of applying such upper bounds to obtain volume lower bounds was first exploited in joint work with V. Bangert. The latter work deduced systolic inequalities from nontrivial cup-product relations, whose role here is played by Massey products.