Related papers: Broken Lefschetz fibrations and smooth structures …

It is well known that, among closed spherical Seifert three-manifolds, only lens spaces and prism manifolds admit several Seifert fibrations which are not equivalent up to diffeomorphism. Moreover the former admit infinitely many…

We show that any finitely presented group with an index two subgroup is realized as the fundamental group of a closed smooth non-orientable four-manifold that admits an exotic smooth structure, which is obtained by performing a Gluck twist.…

We investigate the bounded cohomology of Lefschetz fibrations. If a Lefschetz fibration has regular fiber of genus at least 2 and it has at least two distinct vanishing cycles, we show that its Euler class is not bounded. As a consequence,…

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 exotic smoothings of open 4-manifolds using the minimal genus function and its analog for end homology. While traditional techniques in open 4-manifold smoothing theory give no control of minimal genera, we make progress by using…

We study the possibility of realizing exotic smooth structures on punctured simply connected $4$-manifolds as leaves of a codimension one foliation on a compact manifold. In particular, we show the existence of uncountably many smooth open…

In this note we introduce certain invariants of real Lefschetz fibrations. We call these invariants {\em real Lefschetz chains}. We prove that if the fiber genus is greater than 1, then the real Lefschetz chains are complete invariants of…

Let $R$ be a closed, oriented topological 4-manifold whose Euler characteristic and signature are denoted by $e$ and $\sigma$. We show that if $R$ has order two $\pi_1$, odd intersection form, and $2e + 3\sigma \geq 0$, then for all but…

We show that Fano 4-folds with Picard number 5 have Lefschetz defect 3 if and only if they are toric of combinatorial type K. We also find a characterization for such varieties in terms of Picard number of prime divisors. Moreover, we…

In this paper we study smooth structures on closed oriented 4-manifolds with fundamental group Z_2 and definite intersection form. We construct infinitely many irreducible, smooth, oriented, closed, definite four-manifolds with fundamental…

We define family versions of the invariant of 4-manifolds with contact boundary due to Kronheimer and Mrowka and use these to detect exotic diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds with boundary. Further, we show the existence of the first example of…

In analogy with the vector bundle theory we define universal and strongly universal Lefschetz fibrations over bounded surfaces. After giving a characterization of these fibrations we construct very special strongly universal Lefschetz…

Closed oriented 4-manifolds with the same geometrically 2-dimensional fundamental group (satisfying certain properties) are classified up to $s$-cobordism by their $w_2$-type, equivariant intersection form and the Kirby-Siebenmann…

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,…

We prove a surgery formula for the ordinary Seiberg-Witten invariants, and surgery formulas for the families Seiberg-Witten invariants of families of $4$-manifolds obtained through fibrewise surgery. Our formula expresses the Seiberg-Witten…

We construct using Lefschetz fibrations a large family of contact manifolds with the following properties: Any bounding contact embedding into an exact symplectic manifold satisfying a mild topological assumption is non-displaceable and…

We prove 3-dimensional hyperbolic cone-manifolds are geometrically inflexible: a cone-deformation of a hyperbolic cone-manifold determines a bi-Lipschitz diffeomorphism between initial and terminal manifolds in the deformation in the…

We present existence results for certain singular 2-dimensional foliations on 4-manifolds. The singularities can be chosen to be simple, e.g. the same as those that appear in Lefschetz pencils. There seems to be a wealth of such creatures…

We show that any 4-manifold, after surgery on a curve, admits an achiral Lefschetz fibration. In particular, we show that the connected sum of any simply connected 4-manifold with a 2-sphere bundle over the 2-sphere will admit an achiral…

We study the space of Lie algebras equipped with left-invariant complex structures, $\mathcal{L}_{ J_{\tiny{\mbox{cn}}} }(\mathbb{R}^{2n}) $, with particular attention to their degenerations and deformations. To this end, we identify…