Related papers: All smooth four-dimensional Schoenflies balls are …

A homotopy 4-ball is a smooth 4-manifold with boundary $S^3$ that is homotopy-equivalent to the standard $B^4$. The smooth 4-dimensional Schoenflies problem asks whether every homotopy 4-ball in $S^4$ (or equivalently $\mathbb{C}^2$) is…

Every smooth homotopy 4-sphere is diffeomorphic to the 4-sphere.

Given a result of Herman, we provide a new elementary proof of the fact that the connected component of the group of compactly supported diffeomorphisms is perfect and hence simple. Moreover, we show that every diffeomorphism $g$, which is…

We prove that for every natural number k there are simply connected topological four-manifolds which have at leat k distinct smooth structures supporting Einstein metrics, and also have infinitely many distinct smooth structures not…

The stable Andrews-Curtis conjecture in combinatorial group theory is the statement that every balanced presentation of the trivial group can be simplified to the trivial form by elementary moves corresponding to "handle-slides" together…

We generalise theorems of Khodorovskiy and Park-Park-Shin, and give new topological proofs of those theorems, using embedded surfaces in the 4-ball and branched double covers. These theorems exhibit smooth codimension-zero embeddings of…

We prove that any two smooth h-cobordant simply-connected 4-manifolds can be obtained by taking two manifolds with boundary, one of which is contractible, and gluing them along the boundary via two different attaching maps.

Every stable 4-sphere is identified with the double branched covering space of a trivial surface-knot space. As a result of Wall, it is known that any two orthogonal bases of every stable 4-sphere are transformed into each other by an…

In this paper we prove the connectedness of symplectic ball packings in the complement of a spherical Lagrangian, S^2 or RP^2, in symplectic manifolds that are rational or ruled. Via a symplectic cutting construction this is a natural…

This note has two related but independent parts. Firstly, we prove a generalisation of a recent result of Gay on the smooth mapping class group of $S^4$. Secondly, we give an alternative proof of a consequence of work of Saeki, namely that…

Here we outline a proof for the 4-dimensional smooth Poincare Conjecture.

This is primarily an exposition, combining work of several authors (Curtis, Hsiang, Freedman, Stong, Matveyev, and Bizaca), of the proof that a smooth 5-dimensional h-cobordism between simply connected 4-manifolds is a product off of a…

We show that all closed symplectic 4-manifolds have the packing stability property: there are no obstructions beyond volume to embedding a collection of sufficiently small balls. This generalizes a theorem of Biran which gives the same…

This paper proves that any compact, closed, simply connected and connected three dimensional stellar manifold is stellar equivalent to the three dimensional sphere.

For every $k \geq 2$ and $n \geq 2$ we construct $n$ pairwise homotopically inequivalent simply-connected, closed $4k$-dimensional manifolds, all of which are stably diffeomorphic to one another. Each of these manifolds has hyperbolic…

In this paper we prove the existence of rational homology balls smoothly embedded in regular neighborhoods of certain linear chains of smooth $2$-spheres by using techniques from minimal model program for 3-dimensional complex algebraic…

We prove that symplectic ball packing stability holds for every compact, connected symplectic $4$-manifold with smooth boundary. This follows from a stronger result: the full volume of any such manifold can be filled by a single symplectic…

For each integer $n$ we construct a simply connected $4$-manifold $X$ admitting a smoothly embedded surface $\Sigma$ of self intersection number $n$ such that the complement of the surface has non-trivial fundamental group. This answers a…

We show that a smooth embedding of a closed 3-manifold in S^3 x R can be isotoped so that every generic level divides S^3 x t into two handlebodies (i.e., is Heegaard) provided the original embedding has a unique local maximum with respect…

We show that any two same-genus, oriented, boundary parallel surfaces bounded by a non-split, alternating link into the 4-ball are smoothly isotopic fixing boundary. In other words, any same-genus Seifert surfaces for a non-split,…