Related papers: Broken Lefschetz fibrations and smooth structures …
The purpose of this note is to explain a combinatorial description of closed smooth oriented 4-manifolds in terms of positive Dehn twist factorizations of surface mapping classes, and further explore these connections. This is obtained via…
We present several structural results on closed, nonorientable, smooth $4$--manifolds, extending analogous results and machinery for the orientable case. We prove the existence of simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations and simplified…
It is known that an arbitrary smooth, oriented 4-manifold admits the structure of what is called a broken Lefschetz fibration. Given a broken fibration, there are certain modifications, realized as homotopies of the fibration map, that…
We prove that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X admits a broken Lefschetz fibration (aka singular Lefschetz fibration) over the 2-sphere. Given any closed orientable surface F of square zero in X, we can choose the fibration so that…
We present explicit algorithms for simplifying the topology of indefinite fibrations on 4-manifolds, which include broken Lefschetz fibrations and indefinite Morse 2-functions. The algorithms consist of sequences of moves, which modify…
In this article, we generalize the classification of genus one Lefschetz fibrations to genus one simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations, which have fibers of genera one and zero. We classify genus one Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-disk…
Shapes of four dimensional spaces can be studied effectively via maps to standard surfaces. We explain, and illustrate by quintessential examples, how to simplify such generic maps on 4-manifolds topologically, in order to derive simple…
We introduce hyperelliptic simplified (more generally, directed) broken Lefschetz fibrations, which is a generalization of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations. We construct involutions on the total spaces of such fibrations of genus $g\geq…
We show how to construct broken, achiral Lefschetz fibrations on arbitrary smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifolds. These are generalizations of Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-sphere, where we allow Lefschetz singularities with the…
The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified…
This article presents the constructions of new infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds with the property that any two manifolds in the same family are homeomorphic and, from their construction, seem to be quite different, but cannot be…
Motivated by the programmes initiated by Taubes and Perutz, we study the geometry of near-symplectic 4-manifolds, i.e., manifolds equipped with a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of embedded 1-dimensional submanifolds, and…
We establish constraints on the topology of smooth Lefschetz fibrations with $4$-dimensional fibers, by studying the family Bauer-Furuta invariant. To compute this invariant, we analyze the framed bordism class of 1-dimensional…
In a pair of papers, we construct invariants for smooth four-manifolds equipped with `broken fibrations' - the singular Lefschetz fibrations of Auroux, Donaldson and Katzarkov - generalising the Donaldson-Smith invariants for Lefschetz…
Auroux, Donaldson and Katzarkov introduced broken Lefschetz fibrations as a generalization of Lefshcetz fibrations in order to describe near-symplectic 4-manifolds. We first study monodromy representations of higher sides of genus-1…
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,…
This note presents the handlebody argument for modifying achiral Lefschetz singularities into broken Lefschetz fibrations, yielding a handlebody proof of the existence of broken Lefschetz fibrations on arbitrary closed smooth oriented…
We define a diffeomorphism invariant of smooth 4-manifolds which we can estimate for many smoothings of R^4 and other smooth 4-manifolds. Using this invariant we can show that uncountably many smoothings of R^4 support no Stein structure.…
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…
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…