Classification of real Bott manifolds

A real Bott manifold is the total space of a sequence of $\R P^1$ bundles starting with a point, where each $\R P^1$ bundle is projectivization of a Whitney sum of two real line bundles. A real Bott manifold is a real toric manifold which admits a flat riemannian metric. An upper triangular $(0,1)$ matrix with zero diagonal entries uniquely determines such a sequence of $\R P^1$ bundles but different matrices may produce diffeomorphic real Bott manifolds. In this paper we determine when two such matrices produce diffeomorphic real Bott manifolds. The argument also proves that any graded ring isomorphism between the cohomology rings of real Bott manifolds with $\Z/2$ coefficients is induced by an affine diffeomorphism between the real Bott manifolds. In particular, this implies the main theorem of \cite{ka-ma08} which asserts that two real Bott manifolds are diffeomorphic if and only of their cohomology rings with $\Z/2$ coefficients are isomorphic as graded rings. We also prove that the decomposition of a real Bott manifold into a product of indecomposable real Bott manifolds is unique up to permutations of the indecomposable factors.