On embeddings and acyclic maps

Abstract

Given an acyclic map $X\to Y$ of closed manifolds dimension $d$, we study the relationship between the embeddings of $Y$ in $S^{n}$ with those of $X$ in $S^{n}$ when $n-d \ge 3$. The approach taken here is to first solve the Poincar\'e duality space variant of the problem. We then apply the surgery machine to obtain the corresponding results for manifolds. Thereafter, we focus on the case when $X$ is a smooth homology sphere and deduce results about the homotopy type of the space of block embeddings of $X$ in a sphere.