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

We show that every smooth closed oriented four-manifold admits a decomposition into two co- dimension zero submanifolds with common boundary. Each of these submanifolds carries a structure of a symplectic manifold with pseudo-convex…

We prove that all knots with unknotting number at most 21 are smoothly slice in the K3 surface. We also prove a more general statement for 4-manifolds that contain a plumbing tree of spheres. Our strategy is based on a flexible method to…

The trace of $n$-framed surgery on a knot in $S^3$ is a 4-manifold homotopy equivalent to the 2-sphere. We characterise when a generator of the second homotopy group of such a manifold can be realised by a locally flat embedded 2-sphere…

Kreck proved that two $2q$-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic if and only if they admit normally bordant normal $(q-1)$-smoothings over the same normal $(q-1)$-type $(B,\xi)$. We show that stable diffeomorphism can be replaced by…

In this paper, we show that a smooth 4-manifold diffeomorphic to a complex hypersurface in $\mathbb{CP}^3 $ of degree $d\geq 5$ can be decomposed as the union of $d(d-4)^2$ copies of 4-dimensional pair-of-pants and certain subsets of K3…

We give a survey of geometric approaches to the topological 4-dimensional surgery and 5-dimensional s-cobordism conjectures, with a focus on the study of surfaces in 4-manifolds. The geometric lemma underlying these conjectures is a…

Kreck's modified surgery gives an approach to classifying smooth $2n$-manifolds up to stable diffeomorphism, i.e. up to connected sum with copies of $S^n \times S^n$. In dimension 4, we use a combination of modified and classical surgery to…

Even though the disk embedding theorem is not available in dimension 4 for free fundamental groups, some surgery problems may be shown to have topological solutions. We prove that surgery problems may be solved if one considers closed…

Fintushel and Stern have proved that if S \subset X is a symplectic surface in a symplectic 4-manifold such that S has simply-connected complement and nonnegative self-intersection, then there are infinitely many topologically equivalent…

One approach to produce a pair of homeomorphic-but-not-diffeomophic closed 4-manifolds is to find a knot which is smoothly slice in one but not the other. This approach has never been run successfully. We give the first examples of a pair…

In this paper, we first prove that any closed simply connected 4-manifold that admits a decomposition into two disk bundles of rank greater than 1 is diffeomorphic to one of the standard elliptic 4-manifolds: $\mathbb{S}^4$,…

We prove that every smoothly embedded surface in a 4--manifold can be isotoped to be in bridge position with respect to a given trisection of the ambient 4--manifold; that is, after isotopy, the surface meets components of the trisection in…

Using the rational surgery formula for the Casson--Walker--Lescop invariant of links in the $3$-sphere, we show that any null-homologous knot in a rational homology sphere admits at most two pairs of integral purely cosmetic surgeries. We…

Suppose F is a compact orientable surface, K is a knot in F x I, and N is the 3-manifold obtained by some non-trivial surgery on K. If F x {0} compresses in N, then there is an annulus in F x I with one end K and the other end an essential…

In this article, we construct countably many mutually non-isotopic diffeomorphisms of some closed non simply-connected 4-manifolds that are homotopic to but not isotopic to the identity, by surgery along $\Theta$-graphs. As corollaries of…

We study the $\mathbb{CP}^2$-slicing number of knots, i.e. the smallest $m\geq 0$ such that a knot $K\subseteq S^3$ bounds a properly embedded, null-homologous disk in a punctured connected sum $(\#^m\mathbb{CP}^2)^{\times}$. We give a…

In this article, we show that, at least for non-simply connected case, there exist an infinite family of nondiffeomorphic symplectic 4-manifolds with the same Seiberg-Witten invariants. The main techniques are knot surgery and a covering…

In this article, we construct infinitley many simply connected, nonsymplectic and pairwise nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds starting from E(n) and applying the sequence of knot surgery, ordinary blowups and rational blowdown. We also compute…

We introduce a new operation, double point surgery, on immersed surfaces in a 4-manifold, and use it to construct knotted configurations of surfaces in many 4-manifolds. Taking branched covers, we produce smoothly exotic actions of Z/m x…

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.