Conjugation spaces and edges of compatible torus actions

Duistermaat introduced the concept of ``real locus'' of a Hamiltonian manifold. In that and in others' subsequent works, it has been shown that many of the techniques developed in the symplectic category can be used to study real loci, so long as the coefficient ring is restricted to the integers modulo 2. It turns out that these results seem not necessarily to depend on the ambient symplectic structure, but rather to be topological in nature. This observation prompts the definition of ``conjugation space'' in a paper of the two authors with V. Puppe. Our main theorem in this paper gives a simple criterion for recognizing when a topological space is a conjugation space.