Related papers: On dissolving knot surgery $4$-manifolds under a $…

Let $K$ be a knot in an L-space $Y$ with a Dehn surgery to a surface bundle over $S^1$. We prove that $K$ is rationally fibered, that is, the knot complement admits a fibration over $S^1$. As part of the proof, we show that if $K\subset Y$…

By considering non-orientable surfaces in the surgered manifolds, we show that the 10/3- and -10/3-Dehn surgeries on the 2-bridge knot $9_{27} = S(49,19)$ are not cosmetic, i.e., they give mutually non-homeomorphic manifolds. The knot is…

We introduce a diffeomorphism invariant of $4$-manifolds, the $\mathrm{Pin}^-(2)$-monopole invariant, defined by using the $\mathrm{Pin}^-(2)$-monopole equations. We compute the invariants of several $4$-manifolds, and prove gluing…

Suppose $k$ is an algebraically closed field of characteristic two, let $A_4$ be an alternating group on four letters, and let $H$ be the unique Sylow two-subgroup of $A_4$. Let $X$ be a smooth projective irreducible curve over $k$ with a…

We construct infinite families of topologically isotopic but smoothly distinct knotted spheres in many simply connected 4-manifolds that become smoothly isotopic after stabilizing by connected summing with $S^2 \times S^2$, and as a…

In this paper we determine the integral homology and cohomology groups of a closed 4-manifold X obtained as the generalized fibre sum of two closed 4-manifolds M and N along embedded surfaces of genus g and self-intersection zero. If the…

A cusp-decomposable manifold is a manifold constructed from a finite number of complete, negatively curved, finite volume manifolds and identifying the boundaries of truncated cusps by diffeomorphisms. Using properties of the electric space…

We present a method for finding embedded nullhomologous tori in standard 4-manifolds which can be utilized to change their smooth structure. As an application, we show how to obtain infinite families of simply connected smooth 4-manifolds…

We study smooth, proper embeddings of noncompact surfaces in 4-manifolds, focusing on exotic planes and annuli, i.e., embeddings pairwise homeomorphic to the standard embeddings of R^2 and R^2-int D^2 in R^4. We encounter two uncountable…

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…

The purpose of this article is twofold. First we outline a general construction scheme for producing simply-connected minimal symplectic 4-manifolds with small Euler characteristics. Using this scheme, we illustrate how to obtain…

We show that any 4-manifold admitting a $(g;k_1,k_2,0)$-trisection is an irregular 3-fold cover of the 4-sphere whose branching set is a surface in $S^4$, smoothly embedded except for one singular point which is the cone on a link. A…

We show that all pretzel knots satisfy the (purely) cosmetic surgery conjecture, i.e. Dehn surgeries with different slopes along a pretzel knot provide different oriented three-manifolds.

We prove that every quaternionic-contact structure can be embedded in a quaternionic manifold and define a second fundamental form for a such embedding.

A standard fact about two incompressible surfaces in an irreducible 3-manifold is that one can move one of them by isotopy so that their intersection becomes $\pi_1$-injective. By extending it on the maps of some 3-dimensional…

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…

By studying the example of smooth structures on CP^2#3(-CP^2) we illustrate how surgery on a single embedded nullhomologous torus can be utilized to change the symplectic structure, the Seiberg-Witten invariant, and hence the smooth…

We show that every smooth, closed, orientable 4-manifold X admits a special kind of handlebody decomposition that we call horizontal. We classify the closed 4-manifolds with the simplest horizontal decompositions and we describe all such…

Motivated by a question of Rubel, we consider the problem of characterizing which noncompact hypersurfaces in $\RR^n$ can be regular level sets of a harmonic function modulo a $C^\infty$ diffeomorphism, as well as certain generalizations to…

Let M be either CP^2#3CP^2bar or 3CP^2#5CP^2bar. We construct the first example of a simply-connected symplectic 4-manifold that is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to M.