Normal-Euler excess for disjoint nonorientable surfaces in a closed $4$-manifold
Abstract
Let be a closed connected oriented topological -manifold. We prove that if are pairwise disjoint connected locally flat topologically embedded nonorientable surfaces with nonorientable genera , same-sign twisted normal Euler numbers , and then the normal-Euler excess is bounded above by a constant depending only on . Thus same-sign mod--null families of disjoint nonorientable surfaces in a fixed ambient -manifold have uniformly bounded total excess over Massey's bound. The proof combines a tubing construction with the signature and Euler-characteristic formulas for -fold branched covers. As corollaries, every closed oriented topological -manifold contains only finitely many pairwise disjoint locally flat topologically embedded copies of with , and only finitely many pairwise disjoint tubular neighborhoods modeled on real -plane bundles over whose total spaces are orientable and whose twisted Euler numbers have absolute value greater than . When is a homology -sphere, the ambient error term vanishes, and the theorem recovers Massey's sharp inequality for nonorientable surfaces in .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.03812,
title = {Normal-Euler excess for disjoint nonorientable surfaces in a closed $4$-manifold},
author = {Bennett Chow and Michael Freedman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.03812},
year = {2026}
}