LS-category and topological complexity of Milnor manifolds and corresponding generalized projective product spaces

Abstract: Milnor manifolds are a class of certain codimension-$1$ submanifolds of the product of projective spaces. In this paper, we study the LS-category and topological complexity of these manifolds. We determine the exact value of the LS-category and in many cases, the topological complexity of these manifolds. We also obtain tight bounds on the topological complexity of these manifolds. It is known that Milnor manifolds admit $\mathbb{Z}_2$ and circle actions. We compute bounds on the equivariant LS-category and equivariant topological complexity of these manifolds. Finally, we describe the mod-$2$ cohomology rings of some generalized projective product spaces corresponding to Milnor manifolds and use this information to compute the bound on LS-category and topological complexity of these spaces.