On Thom spaces, Massey products and non-formal symplectic manifolds

Yuli Rudyak and Aleksy Tralle

July 6, 1999

We suggest a simple general method of constructing of non-formal manifolds. In particular, we construct a large family of non-formal symplectic manifolds. Here we detect non-formality via non-triviality of rational Massey products.  In fact, we analyze the behaviour of Massey products of closed manifolds under the blow-up construction.
In this context Thom spaces play the role of a technical tool which allows us to construct non-trivial Massey products in an elegant way.