The telescope conjecture at height 2 and the tmf resolution

Mahowald proved the height 1 telescope conjecture at the prime 2 as an application of his seminal work on bo-resolutions. In this paper we study the height 2 telescope conjecture at the prime 2 through the lens of tmf-resolutions. To this end we compute the structure of the tmf-resolution for a specifc type 2 complex Z. We find that, analogous to the height 1 case, the E1-page of the tmf-resolution possesses a decomposition into a v2-periodic summand, and an Eilenberg-MacLane summand which consists of bounded v2-torsion. However, unlike the height 1 case, the E2-page of the tmf-resolution exhibits unbounded v2-torsion. We compare this to the work of Mahowald-Ravenel-Shick, and discuss how the validity of the telescope conjecture is connected to the fate of this unbounded v2-torsion: either the unbounded v2-torsion kills itself off in the spectral sequence, and the telescope conjecture is true, or it persists to form v2-parabolas and the telescope conjecture is false. We also study how to use the tmf-resolution to effectively give low dimensional computations of the homotopy groups of Z. These computations allow us to prove a conjecture of the second author and Egger: the E(2)-local Adams-Novikov spectral sequence for Z collapses.

v2: 83 pages - substantial revisions and added background