Riemannian Supergeometry

Motivated by a paper of Zirnbauer, we develop a theory of Riemannian supermanifolds up to a definition of Riemannian symmetric superspaces. Various fundamental concepts needed for the study of these spaces both from the Riemannian and the Lie theoretical viewpoint are introduced, e.g. geodesics, isometry groups and invariant metrics on Lie supergroups and homogeneous superspaces.Comment: 43 pages, abridged version of author's thesi

Torsion in equivariant cohomology and Cohen-Macaulay G-actions

We show that the well-known fact that the equivariant cohomology of a torus action is a torsion-free module if and only if the map induced by the inclusion of the fixed point set is injective generalises to actions of arbitrary compact connected Lie groups if one replaces the fixed point set by the set of points with maximal isotropy rank. This is true essentially because the action on this set is always equivariantly formal. In case this set is empty we show that the induced action on the set of points with highest occuring isotropy rank is Cohen-Macaulay. It turns out that just as equivariant formality of an action is equivalent to equivariant formality of the action of a maximal torus, the same holds true for equivariant injectivity and the Cohen-Macaulay property. In addition, we find a topological criterion for equivariant injectivity in terms of orbit spaces.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

Positively curved GKM-manifolds

Let T be a torus of dimension at least k and M a T-manifold. M is a GKM_k-manifold if the action is equivariantly formal, has only isolated fixed points, and any k weights of the isotropy representation in the fixed points are linearly independent. In this paper we compute the cohomology rings with real and integer coefficients of GKM_3- and GKM_4-manifolds which admit invariant metrics of positive sectional curvature.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures. Final version, to appear in IMR