Related papers: The trace embedding lemma and spinelessness
We present a pair of open smooth $4$-manifolds that are mutually homeomorphic. One of them admits a Riemannian metric that possesses quasi-cylindricity, and positivity of scalar curvature and of dimension of certain $L^2$ harmonic forms. By…
We produce infinitely many distinct irreducible smooth 4-manifolds homeomorphic to #(2m+1)(CP^2 # -CP^2) and #(2n+1)(S^2 x S^2), respectively, for each m>3 and n>4. These provide the smallest exotic closed simply connected 4-manifolds with…
In this paper, we study stable equivalence of exotically knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds, surfaces that are topologically isotopic but not smoothly isotopic. We prove that any pair of embedded surfaces in the same homology class become…
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…
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…
We show that on every Spin(7) manifold there always exists a unique linear connection with totally skew-symmetric torsion preserving a nontrivial spinor and the Spin(7) structure. We express its torsion and the Riemannian scalar curvature…
We study closed, oriented 4-manifolds whose fundamental group is that of a closed, oriented, aspherical 3-manifold. We show that two such 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic if and only if they have the same w_2-type and their equivariant…
We introduce the secondary Stiefel-Whitney class $\tilde w_2$ of homotopically trivial diffeomorphisms and show that a homotopically trivial symplectomorphism of a ruled 4-manifold is isotopic to identity if and only if the class $\tilde…
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…
A simple characterization is given of open subsets of a complex surface that smoothly perturb to Stein open subsets. As applications, complex 2-space C^2 contains domains of holomorphy (Stein open subsets) that are exotic R^4's, and others…
We establish constraints on the topology of smooth Lefschetz fibrations with $4$-dimensional fibers, by studying the family Bauer-Furuta invariant. To compute this invariant, we analyze the framed bordism class of 1-dimensional…
M. Freedman showed that every homology 3-sphere embeds as a locally flat submanifold of $S^4$. This is in striking contrast to the state of our knowledge of smooth embeddings of homology spheres. This book surveys what is presently known…
A pair of closed, smooth $4$-manifolds $M$ and $M'$ are stably exotic if they are stably homeomorphic but not stably diffeomorphic, where stabilisation refers to connected sum with copies of $S^2 \times S^2$. Orientable stable exotica do…
We show that if a compact, oriented 4-manifold admits a coassociative-free immersion into the Euclidean 7-space then its Euler characteristic and signature vanish. Moreover, in the spin case the Gauss map is contractible, so that the…
Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with…
We introduce W-spin structures on a Riemann surface and give a precise definition to the corresponding W-spin equations for any quasi-homogeneous polynomial W. Then, we construct examples of nonzero solutions of spin equations in 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,…
In this paper we establish a gap phenomenon for immersed surfaces with arbitrary codimension, topology and boundaries that satisfy one of a family of systems of fourth-order anisotropic geometric partial differential equations. Examples…
Despite spectacular advances in defining invariants for simply connected smooth and symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds and the discovery of effective surgical techniques, we still have been unable to classify simply connected smooth…
We prove a localization theorem for exotic diffeomorphisms, showing that every diffeomorphism of a compact simply-connected 4-manifold that is isotopic to the identity after stabilizing with one copy of $S^2 \times S^2$, is smoothly…