Related papers: Trisecting Smooth 4-dimensional Cobordisms

We construct the first examples of non-smoothable self-homeomorphisms of smooth $4$-manifolds with boundary that fix the boundary and act trivially on homology. As a corollary, we construct self-diffeomorphisms of $4$-manifolds with…

We give a complete classification of the spherical 3-manifolds that bound smooth rational homology 4-balls. Furthermore, we determine the order of spherical 3-manifolds in the rational homology cobordism group of rational homology…

We show that, if a rational homology 3-sphere $Y$ bounds a positive definite smooth 4-manifold, then there are finitely many negative definite lattices, up to the stable-equivalence, which can be realized as the intersection form of a…

A family of closed manifolds is called cohomologically rigid if a cohomology ring isomorphism implies a diffeomorphism for any two manifolds in the family. We establish cohomological rigidity for large families of 3-dimensional and…

Heegaard splittings stratify 3-manifolds by complexity; only $S^3$ admits a genus-zero splitting, and only $S^3$, $S^1 \times S^2$, and lens spaces $L(p,q)$ admit genus-one splittings. In dimension four, the second author and Jeffrey Meier…

In the article we introduce new conformal and smooth invariants on compact, oriented four-manifolds with boundary. In the first part, we show that "positivity" conditions on these invariants will impose topological restrictions on…

A smooth closed 3-manifold $M$ fibered by tori $T^2$ is characterized by an element $\phi \in GL(2,\mathbb{Z})$. We show that $M$ is the boundary of a 4-manifold fibered by tori over a surface such that the bundle structure on $M$ is the…

This is a slightly altered version of the authors thesis from 2014. In the first main part we show that the quotient space of a compact, simply connected and nonnegatively curved Riemannian 4-manifold by an effective, isometric…

We classify the possible elementary amenable fundamental groups of compact aspherical 4-manifolds with boundary and conclude that they are either polycyclic or solvable Baumslag- Solitar. Since these groups are good and satisfy the…

We introduce a new generalization of Gompf nuclei and give applications. We construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures for a large class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary, regarding topological invariants. We prove that a large…

We show that closed, connected 4-manifolds up to connected sum with copies of the complex projective plane are classified in terms of the fundamental group, the orientation character and an extension class involving the second homotopy…

A generic smooth map of a closed $2k$-manifold into $(3k-1)$-space has a finite number of cusps ($\Sigma^{1,1}$-singularities). We determine the possible numbers of cusps of such maps. A fold map is a map with singular set consisting of…

We investigate nicely embedded H--holomorphic maps into stable Hamiltonian three--manifolds. In particular we prove that such maps locally foliate and satisfy a no--first--intersection property. Using the compactness results of…

We classify topological $4$-manifolds with boundary and fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}$, under some assumptions on the boundary. We apply this to classify surfaces in simply-connected $4$-manifolds with $S^3$ boundary, where the fundamental…

We define \emph{piecewise rank 1} manifolds, which are aspherical manifolds that generally do not admit a nonpositively curved metric but can be decomposed into pieces that are diffeomorphic to finite volume, irreducible, locally symmetric,…

This paper extends some results of Hatcher and Quinn beyond the metastable range. We give a bordism theoretic obstruction to deforming a map between manifolds simultaneously off of a collection of pairwise disjoint submanifolds under the…

We show that the number of double points of smoothly immersed 2-spheres representing certain homology classes of an oriented, smooth, closed, simply-connected 4-manifold X must increase with the complexity of corresponding h-cobordisms from…

The goal of this paper is to find a close to isomorphic presentation of 3-manifolds in terms of Hopf algebraic expressions. To this end we define and compare three different braided tensor categories that arise naturally in the study of…

Internal stabilization adds a trivial handle to an embedded surface in a coordinate chart. It is known that any pair of smoothly knotted surfaces in a simply-connected $4$-manifold become smoothly isotopic after sufficiently many internal…

This paper continues the study of decompositions of a smooth 4-manifold into two handlebodies with handles of index $\leq2$. Part I gave existence results in terms of spines and chain complexes over the fundamental group of the ambient…