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

We introduce multisections of smooth, closed 4-manifolds, which generalize trisections to decompositions with more than three pieces. This decomposition describes an arbitrary smooth, closed 4-manifold as a sequence of cut systems on a…

It is shown that any closed three-manifold M obtained by integral surgery on a knot in the three-sphere can always be constructed from integral surgeries on a 3-component link L with each component being an unknot in the three-sphere. It is…

It is known that every compact Stein 4-manifolds can be embedded into a simply connected, minimal, closed, symplectic 4-manifold. By using this property, we discuss a new method of constructing corks. This method generates a large class of…

It is shown that any finite list of smooth closed simply-connected 4-manifolds homeomorphic to a given one X can be obtained by removing a single compact contractible submanifold (or cork) from X, and then regluing it by powers of a…

For 5 <= k <= 8 we show that the infinite family of exotic smooth structures on CP^2# k(-CP^2) can be achieved by 1/n - surgeries on a single embedded nullhomologous torus in a manifold R_k which is homeomorphic to CP^2# k(-CP^2).

In this paper we prove several related results concerning smooth $\Z_p$ or $\s^1$ actions on 4-manifolds. We show that there exists an infinite sequence of smooth 4-manifolds $X_n$, $n\geq 2$, which have the same integral homology and…

We prove that any knot or link in any 3-manifold can be nicely decomposed (splitted) by a filling Dehn sphere. This has interesting consequences in the study of branched coverings over knots and links. We give an algorithm for computing…

One can define the complexity of a smooth 4-manifold as the minimal sum of the number of disks, strands and crossings in a Kirby diagram. Martelli proved that the number of homeomorphism classes of complexity less than n grows as $n^2$. In…

We work in the smooth category. Let $N$ be a closed connected orientable 4-manifold with torsion free $H_1$, where $H_q:=H_q(N;Z)$. Our main result is a complete readily calculable classification of embeddings $N\to R^7$, up to the…

We note that infinitely many irreducible, closed, simply connected 4-manifolds, with prescribed signature and spin type, admit perfect Morse functions, i.e. they can be given handle decompositions without 1- and 3-handles. In particular,…

Some generalizations and variations of the Fintushel-Stern rim surgery are known to produce smoothly knotted surfaces. We show that if the fundamental groups of their complements are cyclic, then these surfaces are topologically unknotted.…

Fintushel-Stern's knot surgery gave many pairs of exotic manifolds, which are homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic. We show that if an elliptic fibration has two parallel, oppositely oriented vanishing circles (for example $S^2\times S^2$ or…

This is a survey article about the connections between knot theory and four-dimensional topology. Every four-manifold can be represented in terms of a link, by a Kirby diagram. This point of view has led to progress in computing invariants…

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…

Loi and Piergallini showed that a smooth compact, connected $4$-manifold $X$ with boundary admits a Stein structure if and only if $X$ is a simple branched cover of a $4$-disk $D^4$ branched along a positive braided surface $S$ in a bidisk…

Markov proved that there exists an unrecognizable 4-manifold, that is, a 4-manifold for which the homeomorphism problem is undecidable. In this paper we consider the question how close we can get to S^4 with an unrecognizable manifold. One…

We prove that the double branched cover of a twist-roll spun knot in $S^4$ is smoothly preserved when four twists are added, and that the double branched cover of a twist-roll spun knot connected sum with a trivial projective plane is…

We give a method for constructing many pairs of distinct knots $K_0$ and $K_1$ such that the two 4-manifolds obtained by attaching a 2-handle to $B^4$ along $K_i$ with framing zero are diffeomorphic. We use the d-invariants of Heegaard…

The polynomial invariants $q_d$ for a large class of smooth 4-manifolds are shown to satisfy universal relations. The relations reflect the possible genera of embedded surfaces in the 4-manifold and lead to a structure theorem for the…

Our purpose is to classify acyclic 4-manifolds having shadow complexity zero. In this paper, we focus on simple polyhedra and discuss this problem combinatorially. We consider a shadowed polyhedron $X$ and a simple polyhedron $X_0$ that is…