English

The Borel/Novikov conjectures and stable diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds

Geometric Topology 2015-11-30 v4

Abstract

Two 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic if they become diffeomorphic after connected sum with S^2 x S^2's. This paper shows that two closed, orientable, homotopy equivalent, smooth 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic, provided a certain map from the second homology of the fundamental group with coefficients in Z/2 to the L-theory of the group is injective. This injectivity is implied by the Borel/Novikov conjecture for torsion-free groups, which is known for many groups. There are also results concerning the homotopy invariance of the Kirby-Siebenmann invariant. The method of proof is to use Poincare duality in Spin bordism to translate between Wall's classical surgery and Kreck's modified surgery.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0406084,
  title  = {The Borel/Novikov conjectures and stable diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds},
  author = {James F. Davis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0406084},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Re-TeXed. The references are now numbered; Geometry and topology of manifolds, 63-76, Fields Inst. Commun., 47, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2005