Related papers: Cyclic Group Actions on Contractible 4-Manifolds

The main result of this paper is that any $3$-dimensional manifold with a finite group action is equivariantly, invertibly homology cobordant to a hyperbolic manifold; this result holds with suitable twisted coefficients as well. The…

The (4k+2)-dimensional Kervaire manifold is a closed, piecewise linear (PL) manifold with Kervaire invariant 1 and the same homology as the product of two (2k+1)-dimensional spheres. We show that a finite group of odd order acts freely on a…

We show that a finite group which admits a faithful, smooth, orientation-preserving action on a homology 4-sphere, and in particular on the 4-sphere, is isomorphic to a subgroup of the orthogonal group SO(5), by explicitly determining the…

In this partly expository monograph we develop a general framework for producing uncountable families of exotic actions of certain classically studied groups acting on the circle. We show that if $L$ is a nontrivial limit group then the…

We study cohomological obstructions to extending group actions on the boundary $\partial M$ of a $3$-manifold to a $C^0$-action on $M$ when $\partial M$ is diffeomorphic to a torus or a sphere. In particular, we show that for a $3$-manifold…

We introduce Koras-Russell fiber bundles over algebraically closed fields of characteristic zero. After a single suspension, this exhibits an infinite family of smooth affine A1-contractible 3-folds. Moreover, we give examples of stably…

Motivated by Akbulut-Larson's construction of Brieskorn spheres bounding rational homology 4-balls, we explore plumbed 3-manifolds that bound rational homology circles and use them to construct infinite families of rational homology…

The present work introduces new perspectives in order to extend finite group actions from surfaces to 3-manifolds. We consider the Schur multiplier associated to a finite group $G$ in terms of principal $G$-bordisms in dimension two, called…

The standard actions of finite groups on spheres S^d are linear actions, i.e. by finite subgroups of the orthogonal group O(d+1). We prove that, in each dimension d>5, there is a finite group G which admits a faithful, topological action on…

We consider orientation-preserving actions of a finite group G on the 3-sphere S^3 (and also on Euclidean space R^3). By the geometrization of finite group actions on 3-manifolds, if such an action is smooth then it is conjugate to an…

Recently Auckly-Kim-Melvin-Ruberman showed that for any finite subgroup G of SO(4) there exists a contractible 4-manifold with an effective G-action on its boundary so that the twists associated to the non-trivial elements of G do not…

We realize 4 of the 6 closed orientable flat 3-manifolds as a cusp section of an orientable finite-volume hyperbolic 4-manifold whose symmetry group acts transitively on the set of cusps.

A conjecture due to Gompf asserts that no nontrivial Brieskorn homology sphere admits a pseudoconvex embedding in ${\mathbb C}^2$, with either orientation. A related question asks whether every compact contractible 4-manifold admits the…

The content of this unpublished paper is subsumed in successive work of the authors, in particular arXiv:1102.0820, arXiv:1102.0821 and arXiv:1205.2434.

We prove that if a finite group $G$ acts smoothly on a manifold $M$ so that all the isotropy subgroups are abelian groups with rank $\leq k$, then $G$ acts freely and smoothly on $M \times \bbS^{n_1} \times...\times \bbS^{n_k}$ for some…

We provide the first information on diffeotopy groups of exotic smoothings of R^4: For each of uncountably many smoothings, there are uncountably many isotopy classes of self-diffeomorphisms. We realize these by various explicit group…

We will give an example of a smooth free action of $S^1=U(1)$ on $S^7$ whose orbits have unbounded lenghts (equivalently: unbounded periods). As an application of this example we construct a $C^{\infty}$ vector field $X$, defined in a…

For every N > 0 there exists a group of deficiency less than -N that arises as the fundamental group of a smooth homology 4-sphere and also as the fundamental group of the complement of a compact contractible submanifold of the 4-sphere. A…

There are four groups $G$ fitting into a short exact sequence $ 1\rightarrow SL(2,5)\rightarrow G\rightarrow C_2\rightarrow 1, $ where $SL(2,5)$ is the special linear group of $(2\times 2)$-matrices with entries in the field of five…

Let $X$ be a smooth, compact, oriented $4$-manifold. Building upon work of Li-Liu, Ruberman, Nakamura and Konno, we consider a families version of Seiberg-Witten theory and obtain obstructions to the existence of certain group actions on…