Fachbereich Mathematik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Schlossgarten- straße~7, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany
Abstract:
Essential results about actions of compact Lie groups on connected manifolds are generalized to proper actions of arbitrary groups on connected cohomology manifolds. Slices are replaced by certain fiber bundle structures on orbit neighborhoods. The group dimension is shown to be effectively finite. The orbits of maximal dimension form a dense open connected subset. If some orbit has codimension at most , then the group is effectively a Lie group.