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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…

We show that any smooth one-dimensional link in the real projective three-plane is the fixed-point locus of a smooth symplectic surface in the complex projective three-plane which is invariant under complex conjugation. The degree of the…

Let E(1)_K denote the closed 4-manifold that is homotopy equivalent (hence homeomorphic) to the rational elliptic surface E(1) and is obtained by performing Fintushel-Stern knot surgery on E(1) using a knot K in S^3. We construct 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…

Conjecturally, a knot is slice if and only if its positive Whitehead double is slice. We consider an analogue of this conjecture for slice disks in the four-ball: two slice disks of a knot are smoothly isotopic if and only if their positive…

It is the purpose of this paper to construct families of examples of nonsymplectic 4-manifolds which (up to sign) have just one Seiberg-Witten basic class.

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a closed smooth 6-manifold N to be diffeomorphic to a product of a surface F and a simply connected 4-manifold M in terms of basic invariants like the fundamental group and cohomological data.…

We define the notion of a braided link cobordism in $S^3 \times [0,1]$, which generalizes Viro's closed surface braids in $\mathbb{R}^4$. We prove that any properly embedded oriented surface $W \subset S^3 \times [0,1]$ is isotopic to a…

We investigate the $C^0$-topology of the group of symplectic diffeomorphisms of positive symplectic rational surfaces. For all but a few exceptions, we prove that the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms forms a connected component in the…

In this paper we study whether symplectic toric manifolds are symplectically cohomologically rigid. Here we say that symplectic cohomological rigidity holds for some family of symplectic manifolds if the members of that family can be…

Our main result gives an adjunction inequality for embedded surfaces in certain $4$-manifolds with contact boundary under a non-vanishing assumption on the Bauer--Furuta type invariants. Using this, we give infinitely many knots in $S^3$…

We study locally flat disks in $(\mathbb{C} P^2)^\circ:=(\mathbb{C} P^2)\setminus \mathring{B^4}$ with boundary a fixed knot $K$ and whose complement has fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}$. We show that up to topological isotopy rel. boundary,…

Frucht showed that, for any finite group $G$, there exists a cubic graph such that its automorphism group is isomorphic to $G$. For groups generated by two elements we simplify his construction to a graph with fewer nodes. In the general…

We prove a surface embedding theorem for 4-manifolds with good fundamental group in the presence of dual spheres, with no restriction on the normal bundles. The new obstruction is a Kervaire-Milnor invariant for surfaces and we give a…

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…

In this paper we construct a family of symplectic 4--manifolds with positive signature for any given fundamental group $G$ that approaches the BMY line. The family is used to show that one cannot hope to do better than than the BMY…

In this short article we give a criterion whether a given minimal symplectic 4-manifold with $b_{2}^{+}=1$ having a torsion-free canonical class is rational or ruled. As a corollary, we confirm that most of homotopy elliptic surfaces…

We prove that all minimal symplectic four-manifolds are essentially irreducible. We also clarify the relationship between holomorphic and symplectic minimality of K\"ahler surfaces. This leads to a new proof of the deformation-invariance of…

We prove that a family of meromorphic mappings from a bidisc to a compact complex surface, which are equicontinuous in a neighborhood of the boundary of the bidisc, has the volumes of its graphs locally uniformly bounded.

We use symplectic tools to establish a smooth variant of Franks theorem for a closed orientable surface of positive genus $g$; it implies that a symplectic diffeomorphism isotopic to the identity with more than $2g-2$ fixed points, counted…