Related papers: Isotoping 2-spheres in 4-manifolds

For embedded 2-spheres in a 4-manifold sharing the same embedded transverse sphere homotopy implies isotopy, provided the ambient 4-manifold has no $\BZ_2$-torsion in the fundamental group. This gives a generalization of the classical light…

This note serves to record examples of diffeomorphisms of closed smooth $4$-manifolds $X$ that are homotopic but not pseudoisotopic to the identity, and to explain why there are no such examples when $X$ is orientable and its fundamental…

Four observations compose the main results of this note. The first records the existence of a smoothly embedded 2-sphere $S$ inside $\mathbb{R} P^2\times S^2$ such that performing a Gluck twist on $S$ produces a manifold $Y$ that is…

We show that many explicit examples of exotic pairs of surfaces in a smooth 4-manifold become smoothly isotopic after one external stabilization with $S^2\times S^2$ or $CP^2\#\overline{CP^2}$. Our results cover surfaces produced by…

It is one of the most important facts in 4-dimensional topology that not every spherical homology class of a 4-manifold can be represented by an embedded sphere. In 1978, M. Freedman and R. Kirby showed that in the simply connected case,…

I prove that any two smooth collections of spanning 3-discs for the trivial 2-link in $S^4$ become smoothly isotopic rel. boundary after pushing them into $D^5$.

We show that any number of disjointly embedded 2-spheres in 4-space can be pulled apart by a link homotopy, ie, by a motion in which the 2-spheres stay disjoint but are allowed to self-intersect.

This paper shows that there are symplectic four-manifolds M with the following property: a single isotopy class of smooth embedded two-spheres in M contains infinitely many Lagrangian submanifolds, no two of which are isotopic as Lagrangian…

We consider mapping class groups \Gamma(M) = pi_0 Diff(M fix \partial M) of smooth compact simply connected oriented 4-manifolds M bounded by a collection of 3-spheres. We show that if M contains CP^2 (with either orientation) as a…

Two 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic if they become diffeomorphic after connected sum with S^2 x S^2's. This paper shows that two closed, orientable, homotopy equivalent, smooth 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic, provided a certain…

We show that there exist infinitely many pairwise non-isotopic splitting spheres for two unlinked, unknotted $S^2$'s in $S^4$. This answers a question posed by Hughes, Kim, and Miller.

We use surgery along 2-tori embedded in a union of two copies of a product of punctured 2-tori to produce a new collection of homotopy 4-spheres (4-manifolds homotopy equivalent to $S^4$ and hence homeomorphic to $S^4$ but possibly not…

A result of Baykur-Sunukjian states that homologous surfaces in a 4-manifold become isotopic after a finite number of internal stabilizations, i.e. attaching tubes to the surfaces. A natural question is how many stabilizations are needed…

In this paper we will show that two surfaces of the same genus and homology class in a simply connected 4-manifold are concordant. We will show they are often topologically isotopic when their complements have cyclic fundamental group.…

We study symplectic surfaces in ruled symplectic 4-manifolds which are disjoint from a given symplectic section. As a consequence we see that, in any symplectic 4-manifold, two homologous symplectic surfaces which are sufficiently C^0 close…

In this paper, Problem 4.17 on R. Kirby's problem list is solved by constructing infinitely many aspherical 4-manifolds that are homology 4-spheres

We prove that many simply connected symplectic four-manifolds dissolve after connected sum with only one copy of $S^{2}\times S^{2}$. For any finite group G that acts freely on the three-sphere we construct closed smooth four-manifolds with…

In this paper, we are concerned with interactions between isoparametric theory and differential topology. Two foliations are called equivalent if there exists a diffeomorphism between the foliated manifolds mapping leaves to leaves. Using…

For any link in the $3$-sphere, we give a visual construction of a stable map $f$ from the $3$-sphere into the real plane enjoying the following properties; $f$ has no cusp point, the set of definite fold points of $f$ is isotopic to the…

In this paper, we collect various structural results to determine when an integral homology $3$--sphere bounds an acyclic smooth $4$--manifold, and when this can be upgraded to a Stein manifold. In a different direction we study whether…