Exotic almost complex circle actions on 6-manifolds

Jang has proven a remarkable classification of 6-dimensional manifolds having an almost complex circle action with 4 fixed points. Jang classifies the weights and associated multigraph into six cases, leaving the existence of connected manifolds fitting into two of the cases unknown. We show that one of the unknown cases may be constructed by a surgery construction of Kustarev, and the underlying manifold is diffeomorphic to \(S^4 \times S^2\). We show that the action is not equivariantly diffeomorphic to a linear one, thus giving an exotic \(S^1\)-action of on a product of spheres that preserves an almost complex structure. We also prove a uniqueness statement for the almost complex structures produced by Kustarev’s construction and prove some topological applications of Jang’s classification.