Exotic structures on hyperbolic manifolds via the EO-theory of Projective Spaces

Farrell and Jones showed that negatively curved manifolds in dimension $\ge 5$ are topologically rigid in the sense that homotopy equivalence implies homeomorphism. In the smooth category, the result does not hold even for hyperbolic manifolds, and there are negatively curved manifolds $N$ homotopy equivalent to a given hyperbolic manifold $M$ but not diffeomorphic. For complex hyperbolic manifolds, the analogous construction is demonstrated only in dimensions of the form $8n+2$. In this paper, we prove this result in many other dimensions. The main approach involves the use of $EO$-theory of complex projective spaces to construct suitable examples of exotic spheres. These theories may be viewed as a version of real $K$-theory, and are defined at each prime $p$. The computation also yields positive results about the existence of free smooth $S^1$ and $S^3$ actions on exotic spheres which do not bound parallelizable manifolds.