Related papers: Small exotic rational surfaces without 1- and 3-ha…
An asymptotic formula for the Tian-Paul CM-line of a flat family blown-up at a flat closed sub-scheme is given. As an application we prove that the blow-up of a polarized manifold along a (relatively) Chow-unstable submanifold admits no…
We prove that any symplectic 4-manifold which is not a rational or ruled surface, after sufficiently many blow-ups, admits an arbitrary number of nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibrations of the same genus which cannot be obtained from one another…
We establish the vanishing of the third unramified cohomology group for many types of Fano hypersurfaces in projective space over an algebraically closed field of arbitrary characteristic, and over a finite field. For cubic hypersurfaces…
A very general hypersurface of dimension $n$ and degree $d$ in complex projective space is rational if $d \leq 2$, but is expected to be irrational for all $n, d \geq 3$. Hypersurfaces in weighted projective space with degree small relative…
We prove that a positive definite smooth four-manifold with $b_2^+ \geq 2$ and having either no 1-handles or no 3-handles cannot admit a symplectic structure.
It is well known that for any exotic pair of simply connected closed oriented 4-manifolds, one is obtained from the other by twisting a compact contractible submanifold via an involution on the boundary. By contrast, here we show that for…
Some classes of cubic fourfolds are birational to fibrations over $P^2$, where the fibers are rational surfaces. This is the case for cubics containing a plane (resp. an elliptic ruled surface), where the fibers are quadric surfaces (resp.…
We study some symplectic geometric aspects of rationally connected 4-folds. As a corollary, we prove that any smooth projective 4-fold symplectic deformation equivalent to a Fano 4-fold of pseudo-index at least 2 or a rationally connected…
Given a symplectic manifold (M, {\omega}) and a Lagrangian submanifold L, we construct versions of the symplectic blow-up and blow-down which are defined relative to L. Furthermore, we show that if M admits an anti-symplectic involution…
We give a novel and effective criterion for algebraicity of rational normal analytic surfaces constructed from resolving the singularity of an irreducible curve-germ on $CP^2$ and contracting the strict transform of a given line and all but…
We use almost toric fibrations and the symplectic rational blow-up to determine when certain Lagrangian pinwheels, which we call liminal, embed in symplectic rational and ruled surfaces. The case of $L_{2,1}$-pinwheels, namely Lagrangian…
We initiate the study of exotic Dehn twists along 3-manifolds $\neq S^3$ inside $4$-manifolds, which produces the first known examples of exotic diffeomorphisms of contractible 4-manifolds, more generally of definite 4-manifolds, and exotic…
We construct non-K\"ahler Calabi-Yau manifolds of dimension $\ge$ 4 with arbitrarily large 2nd Betti numbers by smoothing normal crossing varieties. The examples have K3 fibrations over smooth projective varieties and their algebraic…
We present a new systematic approach to constructing spherical codes in dimensions $2^k$, based on Hopf foliations. Using the fact that a sphere $S^{2n-1}$ is foliated by manifolds $S_{\cos\eta}^{n-1} \times S_{\sin\eta}^{n-1}$,…
In this brief note, we show that there exist smooth 4-manifolds (with nonempty boundary) containing pairs of exotically knotted 2-spheres that remain exotic after one (either external or internal) stabilization. It follows that the ``one is…
We construct and study the skein lasagna module obtained by importing the Bar-Natan Khovanov homology package. For 4-manifolds satisfying a non-vanishing condition, we produce pairs of exotic surfaces (with boundary) by using the behavior…
A fundamental result in 4-manifold topology asserts that any two exotic smooth structures on a simply-connected, closed 4-manifold differ by a cork twist: the operation of removing a compact, contractible, codimension-zero submanifold and…
We construct rational elliptic surfaces of index two by explicitly constructing their associated Halphen pencils in the projective plane $\mathbb{P}^2$. For each of the types of singular fibers that occur we construct at least one example…
Dimension 4 is the first dimension in which exotic smooth manifold pairs appear -- manifolds which are topologically the same but for which there is no smooth deformation of one into the other. Whilst smooth and triangulated 4-manifolds do…
In this article, we show the existence of a nontrivial Riemann surface lamination embedded in $\mathbb{CP}^2$ by using Donaldson's construction of asymptotically holomorphic submanifolds. Further, the lamination we obtain has the property…