Related papers: Exotic smooth structures on 4-manifolds with zero …
We construct series of examples of exotic smooth structures on compact locally symmetric spaces of noncompact type. In particular, we obtain higher rank examples, which do not support Riemannian metric of nonpositive curvature. The examples…
Smooth manifolds have been always understood intuitively as spaces with an affine geometry on the infinitesimal scale. In Synthetic Differential Geometry this can be made precise by showing that a smooth manifold carries a natural structure…
Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with…
We use Furuta's result, usually referred to as ``10/8-conjecture'', to show that for any compact 3-manifold $M$ the open manifold $M\times\r$ has infinitely many different smooth structures. Another consequence of Furuta's result is…
This paper addresses several isotopy problems on $4$-manifolds. First, we classify the isotopy classes of embeddings of $\Sigma$ in $\Sigma\times S^2$ that are geometrically dual to $\{\mbox{pt}\}\times S^2$, where $\Sigma$ is a closed…
We show that for every odd prime $q$, there exists an infinite family $\{M_i\}_{i=1}^{\infty}$ of topological 4-manifolds that are all stably homeomorphic to one another, all the manifolds $M_i$ have isometric rank one equivariant…
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.…
We present the various constructions of new symplectic $4$-manifolds with non-negative signatures using the complex surfaces on the BMY line $c_1^2 = 9\chi_h$, the Cartwright-Steger surfaces, the quotients of Hirzebruch's certain…
We study the $\mathbb{CP}^2$-slicing number of knots, i.e. the smallest $m\geq 0$ such that a knot $K\subseteq S^3$ bounds a properly embedded, null-homologous disk in a punctured connected sum $(\#^m\mathbb{CP}^2)^{\times}$. We give a…
We prove:(1) the existence, for every integer n > 3, of a noncompact smooth n-dimensional topological manifold whose diffeomorphism group contains an isomorphic copy of every finitely presented group; (2) a finiteness theorem on finite…
We study how to construct explicit deformations of generic smooth maps from closed $n$--dimensional manifolds $M$ with $n \geq 2$ to the $2$--sphere $S^2$ and show that every smooth map $M \to S^2$ is homotopic to a $C^\infty$ stable map…
We introduce a new generalization of Gompf nuclei and give applications. We construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures for a large class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary, regarding topological invariants. We prove that a large…
For every $k \geq 2$ we construct infinitely many $4k$-dimensional manifolds that are all stably diffeomorphic but pairwise not homotopy equivalent. Each of these manifolds has hyperbolic intersection form and is stably parallelisable. In…
We obtain constraints on the topology of families of smooth $4$-manifolds arising from a finite dimensional approximation of the families Seiberg-Witten monopole map. Amongst other results these constraints include a families generalisation…
We show that there exists an algorithm that takes as input two closed, simply connected, topological 4-manifolds and decides whether or not these 4-manifolds are homeomorphic. In particular, we explain in detail how closed, simply…
In this article, we give new means of constructing and distinguishing closed exotic four-manifolds. Using Heegaard Floer homology, we define new closed four-manifold invariants that are distinct from the Seiberg--Witten and Bauer--Furuta…
Recent discoveries in differential topology are reviewed in light of their possible implications for spacetime models and related subjects in theoretical physics. Although not often noted, a particular smoothness (differentiability)…
We construct an infinite family $\{ C_{n,k}\}_{k=1}^{\infty}$ of corks of Mazur type satisfying $2n\leq \mathrm{sc}^{\mathrm{sp}}(C_{n,k})\leq O(n^{3/2})$ for any positive integer $n$. Furthermore, using these corks, we construct an…
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 note that infinitely many irreducible, closed, simply connected 4-manifolds, with prescribed signature and spin type, admit perfect Morse functions, i.e. they can be given handle decompositions without 1- and 3-handles. In particular,…