Sphere fibrations over highly connected manifolds

Abstract We construct sphere fibrations over ‐connected ‐manifolds such that the total space is a connected sum of sphere products. More precisely, for even, we construct fibrations , where is a ‐connected ‐dimensional Poincaré duality complex that satisfies , in a localised category of spaces. The construction of the fibration is proved for , where the prime 2, and the primes that occur as torsion in are inverted. In specific cases, by either assuming is small, or assuming is large we can reduce the number of primes that need to be inverted. Integral results are obtained for or 4, and if is bigger than the number of cyclic summands in the stable stem , we obtain results after inverting 2. Finally, we prove some applications for fibrations over , and for looped configuration spaces.