Topological toric manifolds

Abstract: We introduce the notion of a topological toric manifold and a topological fan and show that there is a bijection between omnioriented topological toric manifolds and complete non-singular topological fans. A topological toric manifold is a topological analogue of a toric manifold and the family of topological toric manifolds is much larger than that of toric manifolds. A topological fan is a combinatorial object generalizing the notion of a simplicial fan in toric geometry. Prior to this paper, two topological analogues of a toric manifold have been introduced. One is a quasitoric manifold and the other is a torus manifold. One major difference between the previous notions and topological toric manifolds is that the former support a smooth action of an $S^1$-torus while the latter support a smooth action of a $\C^*$-torus. We also discuss their relation in details.