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

In this article, we study a class of closed connected orientable PL $4$-manifolds admitting a semi-simple crystallization and which have an infinite cyclic fundamental group. We show that the manifold in the class admits a handle…

We prove that an embedded cobordism between manifolds with boundary can be split into a sequence of right product and left product cobordisms, if the codimension of the embedding is at least two. This is a topological counterpart of the…

Kirby diagrams for smooth four-dimensional manifolds typically depict only the 1- and 2-handles, omitting the 3-handles. In this work, we undertake a study of 3-handle attachments and provide tools to explicitly include them in handle…

A spinal open book decomposition on a contact manifold is a generalization of a supporting open book which exists naturally e.g. on the boundary of a symplectic filling with a Lefschetz fibration over any compact oriented surface with…

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 present a new proof of a result due to Taubes: if X is a closed symplectic four-manifold with b_+(X) > 1+b_1(X) and with some positive multiple of the symplectic form a rational class, then the Poincare dual of the canonical class of X…

It is shown that any finite list of smooth closed simply-connected 4-manifolds homeomorphic to a given one X can be obtained by removing a single compact contractible submanifold (or cork) from X, and then regluing it by powers of a…

Closed (and simply-connected) manifolds whose dimensions are greater than 4 are classified via sophisticated algebraic and abstract theory such as surgery theory and homotopy theory. It is difficult to handle 3 or 4-dimensional closed…

The purpose of this paper is to establish several new results about the Hodge theory of Lagrangian fibrations on (not necessarily compact) holomorphic symplectic manifolds. Let $M$ be a holomorphic symplectic manifold of dimension $2n$ that…

The main purpose of this paper is to summarize the basic ingredients, illustrated with examples, of a pseudoholomorphic curve theory for symplectic 4-orbifolds. These are extensions of relevant work of Gromov, McDuff and Taubes on…

We initiate a study of positive multisections of Lefschetz fibrations via positive factorizations in framed mapping class groups of surfaces. Using our methods, one can effectively capture various interesting symplectic surfaces in…

We explicitly construct a genus-$3$ Lefschetz fibration over $\mathbb{S}^{2}$ whose total space is $\mathbb{T}^{2}\times \mathbb{S}^{2}\# 6\overline{\mathbb{C} P^{2}}$ using the monodromy of Matsumoto's genus-$2$ Lefschetz fibration. We…

We compute the formal Poisson cohomology of a broken Lefschetz fibration by calculating it at fold and Lefschetz singularities. Near a fold singularity the computation reduces to that for a point singularity in 3 dimensions. For the Poisson…

In [2], the first author constructed the first known examples of exotic minimal symplectic $\CP#5\CPb$ and minimal symplectic 4-manifold that is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to $3\CP#7\CPb$. The construction in [2] uses Y. Matsumoto's…

We have been interested in understanding the class of 7-dimensional closed and simply-connected manifolds in geometric and constructive ways. We have constructed explicit fold maps, which are higher dimensional versions of Morse functions,…

A real 3- or 4-manifold has by definition an orientation preserving smooth involution acting on it. We consider Lefschetz fibrations of 4-dimensional manifolds-with-boundary and open book decompositions on their boundary in the existence of…

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 study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…

We compute the oriented cobordism group of fold maps of 4-manifolds into the space with all the possible restrictions (and also with no restriction) to the singular fibers. We also give geometric invariants which describe completely the…

Let $X$ be a Weinstein manifold with ideal contact boundary $Y$. If $\Lambda\subset Y$ is a link of Legendrian spheres in $Y$ then by attaching Weinstein handles to $X$ along $\Lambda$ we get a Weinstein cobordism $X_{\Lambda}$ with a…