Related papers: Exotic rational elliptic surfaces without 1-handle…

A trisection of a smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifold is a decomposition into three 4-dimensional 1-handlebodies meeting pairwise in 3-dimensional 1-handlebodies, with triple intersection a closed surface. The fundamental groups of the…

We give an infinite family of embeddings of $\mathbb{R} P^2$ to $S^4$ such that they are mutually topologically isotopic however are not smoothly isotopic to each other. Moreover, they are topologically isotopic to the standard $P^2$-knot.…

The main result of this paper states that a symplectic s-cobordism of elliptic 3-manifolds is diffeomorphic to a product (assuming a canonical contact structure on the boundary). Based on this theorem, we conjecture that a smooth…

We prove that the rational blowdown, a surgery on smooth 4-manifolds introduced by Fintushel and Stern, can be performed in the symplectic category. As a consequence, interesting families of smooth 4-manifolds, including the exotic $K3$…

In $1961$, Mazur constructed a contractible, compact, smooth $4$-manifold with boundary which is not homeomorphic to the standard $4$-ball, using a $0$-handle, a $1$-handle and a $2$-handle. In this paper, for any integer $n\geq2,$ we…

In this note we prove that, for any integer n, there exist a smooth 4-manifold, homotopic to a K3 surface, defined by applying the link surgery method of Fintushel-Stern to a certain 2-component graph link, which admits n inequivalent…

The Kuperberg invariant is a topological invariant of closed 3-manifolds based on finite-dimensional Hopf algebras. In this paper, we initiate the program of constructing 4-manifold invariants in the spirit of Kuperberg's 3-manifold…

We prove that if a symplectic 4-manifold $X$ becomes a rational 4-manifold after applying rational blow-down surgery, then the symplectic 4-manifold $X$ is originally rational. That is, a symplectic rational blow-up of a rational symplectic…

We show that there exist smooth, simply connected, four-dimensional spin manifolds which do not admit Einstein metrics, but nonetheless satisfy the strict Hitchin-Thorpe inequality. Our construction makes use of the Bauer/Furuta cohomotopy…

We exhibit many examples of closed symplectic manifolds on which there is an autonomous Hamiltonian whose associated flow has no nonconstant periodic orbits (the only previous explicit example in the literature was the torus T^2n (n\geq 2)…

We consider a connected negative definite plumbing graph, and we assume that the associated plumbed 3-manifold is a rational homology sphere. We provide two new combinatorial formulae for the Seiberg-Witten invariant of this manifold. The…

Fintushel and Stern have proved that if S \subset X is a symplectic surface in a symplectic 4-manifold such that S has simply-connected complement and nonnegative self-intersection, then there are infinitely many topologically equivalent…

A version of Kirby calculus for spin and framed three-manifolds is given and is used to construct invariants of spin and framed three-manifolds in two situations. The first is ribbon *-categories which possess odd degenerate objects. This…

We introduce a framework to prove integral rigidity results for the Seiberg-Witten invariants of a closed $4$-manifold $X$ containing a non-separating hypersurface $Y$ satisfying suitable (chain-level) Floer theoretic conditions. As a…

We show that any smooth, closed, oriented, connected 4--manifold can be trisected into three copies of $\natural^k (S^1 \times B^3)$, intersecting pairwise in 3--dimensional handlebodies, with triple intersection a closed 2--dimensional…

This paper continues the study of decompositions of a smooth 4-manifold into two handlebodies with handles of index $\leq2$. Part I gave existence results in terms of spines and chain complexes over the fundamental group of the ambient…

The ellipsoid embedding function of a symplectic manifold gives the smallest amount by which the symplectic form must be scaled in order for a standard ellipsoid of the given eccentricity to embed symplectically into the manifold. It was…

We investigate the $\mathrm{Pin}^-(2)$-monopole invariants of symplectic $4$-manifolds and K\"{a}hler surfaces with real structures. We prove the nonvanishing theorem for real symplectic $4$-manifolds which is an analogue of Taubes'…

We construct smooth 4-manifolds homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to $CP^2#k\bar{CP^2},k \in {6,7,8,9}$, using the technique of rational blow-down along Wahl type plumbing trees of spheres.

We construct a minimal complex surface of general type with $p_g=0$, $K^2 =4$, and $\pi_1=\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z}$ using a rational blow-down surgery and a $\mathbb{Q}$-Gorenstein smoothing theory. In a similar fashion, we also construct a…