Related papers: Round handles, logarithmic transforms, and smooth …

The topology of Stein surfaces and contact 3-manifolds is studied by means of handle decompositions. A simple characterization of homeomorphism types of Stein surfaces is obtained --- they correspond to open handlebodies with all handles of…

For every integer g greater than or equal to 2, there exist infinitely many pairwise nonhomeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds that admit genus-g Lefschetz fibrations over S^2 but do not carry any complex structure with either orientation. This…

The aim of this paper is to give an $s$-cobordism classification of topological $4$-manifolds in terms of the standard invariants using the group of homotopy self-equivalences. Hambleton and Kreck constructed a braid to study the group of…

We show that the pre-order defined on the category of contact manifolds by arbitrary symplectic cobordisms is considerably less rigid than its counterparts for exact or Stein cobordisms: in particular, we exhibit large new classes of…

The rational blowdown operation in 4-manifold topology replaces a neighborhood of a configuration of spheres by a rational homology ball. Such configurations typically arise from resolutions of surface singularities that admit rational…

Applying logarithmic transformations along 2-tori, we construct a generalized complex structure J_n with n type changing luci for every $n\geq 0$ on genus 1-Lefschetz fibrations with a cusp neighborhood, which include elliptic surfaces with…

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…

By extending a result of Kronheimer-Mrowka to the family setting, we prove a gluing formula for the family Seiberg-Witten invariant. This formula allows one to compute the invariant for a smooth family of 4-manifolds by cutting it open…

We construct noncomplex smooth 4-manifolds which admit genus-2 Lefschetz fibrations over S^2. The fibrations are necessarily hyperelliptic, and the resulting 4-manifolds are not even homotopy equivalent to complex surfaces. Furthermore,…

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…

We study which lens spaces can bound smooth 4-manifolds with second Betti number one under various topological conditions. Specifically, we show that there are infinite families of lens spaces that bound compact, simply-connected, smooth…

Donaldson showed that every closed symplectic 4-manifold can be given the structure of a topological Lefschetz pencil. Gay and Kirby showed that every closed 4-manifold has a trisection. In this paper we relate these two structure theorems,…

We give complete geometric invariants of cobordisms of framed fold maps. These invariants consist of two types. We take the immersion of the fold singular set into the target manifold together with information about non-triviality of the…

We introduce an idea of constructing Lefschetz fibrations of Weinstein manifolds from Weinstein handle decompositions on them. We prove theorems that formulate the idea for the cases of cotangent bundles and some plumbings. As a corollary,…

Define the Donaldson series of a simply connected 4-manifold by q(X) = \sum_d q_d(X)/d! Recently Kronheimer and Mroka have announced the result that the Donaldson series of so called simple 4-manifolds can be written as q(X) =…

Our main result is a generalization of Cappell's 5-dimensional splitting theorem. As an application, we analyze, up to internal s-cobordism, the smoothable splitting and fibering problems for certain 5-manifolds mapping to the circle. For…

We give a generalization of the concept of near-symplectic structures to 2n dimensions. According to our definition, a closed 2-form \omega on a 2n-manifold M is near-symplectic, if it is symplectic outside a submanifold Z of codimension 3,…

Many open problems and important theorems in low-dimensional topology have been formulated as statements about certain 2--complexes called gropes. This paper describes a precise correspondence between embedded gropes in 4--manifolds and the…

We prove that Lagrangian cocores and Lagrangian linking disks of a stopped Weinstein manifold generate the Lagrangian cobordism infinity-category. As a geometric consequence, we see that any brane (after stabilization) admits a Lagrangian…

This is primarily an exposition, combining work of several authors (Curtis, Hsiang, Freedman, Stong, Matveyev, and Bizaca), of the proof that a smooth 5-dimensional h-cobordism between simply connected 4-manifolds is a product off of a…