Mapping degrees of self-maps of simply-connected manifolds

Abstract

An oriented compact closed manifold is called inflexible if the set of mapping degrees ranging over all continuous self-maps is finite. Inflexible manifolds have become of importance in the theory of functorial semi-norms on homology. Although inflexibility should be a generic property in large dimensions, not many simply-connected examples are known. We show that from a certain dimension on there are infinitely many inflexible manifolds in each dimension. Besides, we prove flexibility for large classes of manifolds and, in particular, as a spin-off, for homogeneous spaces. This is an outcome of a lifting result which also permits to generalise a conjecture of Copeland--Shar to the "real world". Moreover, we then provide examples of simply-connected smooth compact closed manifolds in each dimension from dimension 70 on which have the following properties: They do not admit any self-map which reverses orientation. (For this we consider the lack of orientation reversal in the strongest sense possible, i.e. we prove the non-existence of any self-map of arbitrary negative mapping degree.) Moreover, the manifolds neither split as non-trivial Cartesian products nor as non-trivial connected sums.