On a Weak Form of the Topological Hedetniemi Conjecture

Abstract: The topological Hedetniemi conjecture asserts that the topological index of the product of two (\mathbb{Z}/2)-complexes is equal to the minimum of their respective indices. Bui and Daneshpajouh studied a natural generalization of this conjecture to (G)-spaces and proved that this generalized conjecture fails whenever the group (G) is neither cyclic of prime-power order nor generalized quaternion. More precisely, for any such group (G), they constructed finite free (G)-simplicial complexes, each having topological index one, whose product has topological index zero. The purpose of this note is to demonstrate that this discrepancy can be made arbitrarily large. Indeed, for every integer (n\geq 1), we show that there exist two finite free (G)-simplicial complexes, each of topological index $n$, whose product has topological index zero, provided that (G) is neither cyclic of prime-power order nor generalized quaternion. In particular, the corresponding weak form of the generalized topological Hedetniemi conjecture fails in the strongest possible sense for those groups.