Manifolds of the homotopy type of a bouquet of spheres
We summarize here the main ideas and results of our papers [28], [14], as presented at the 2013 CIRM Meeting on Discrete curvature and we augment these by bringing up an application of one of our main results, namely to solving a problem regarding cube complexes.
We prove that the complement of a toric arrangement has the homotopy type of a minimal CW-complex. As a corollary we deduce that the integer cohomology of these spaces is torsionfree. We apply discrete Morse theory to the toric Salvetti complex, providing a sequence of cellular collapses that leads to a minimal complex.