Detectability of cosmic topology in flat universes

Recent observations seem to indicate that we live in a universe whose spatial sections are nearly or exactly flat. Motivated by this we study the problem of observational detection of the topology of universes with flat spatial sections. We first give a complete description of the diffeomorphic classification of compact flat 3-manifolds, and derive the expressions for the injectivity radii, and for the volume of each class of Euclidean 3-manifolds. There emerges from our calculations the undetectability conditions for each (topological) class of flat universes. To illustrate the delectability of flat topologies we construct toy models by using an assumption by Bernshtein and Shvartsman which permits to establish a relation between topological typical lengths to the dynamics of flat models. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.