Related papers: The trace embedding lemma and spinelessness

We investigate the realisability of the Casson-Sullivan invariant for homeomorphisms of smooth $4$-manifolds, which is the obstruction to a homeomorphism being stably pseudo-isotopic to a diffeomorphism, valued in the third cohomology of…

The aim of this paper is to discuss some applications of the relation between Seiberg-Witten theory and two natural norms defined on the first cohomology group of a closed 3-manifold N - the Alexander and Thurston norms. We start by giving…

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…

In the paper \cite{wall_1}, C.T.C. Wall proved that two smooth closed simply connected 4-manifolds which are homeomorphic are in fact stably diffeomorphic. We prove a similar result which states that two smooth closed 4-manifolds satisfying…

It is well known that for any exotic pair of simply connected closed oriented 4-manifolds, one is obtained from the other by twisting a compact contractible submanifold via an involution on the boundary. By contrast, here we show that for…

As our main theorem, we prove that a Lipschitz map from a compact Riemannian manifold $M$ into a Riemannian manifold $N$ admits a smooth approximation via immersions if the map has no singular points on $M$ in the sense of F.H. Clarke,…

We investigate an integrable property and observables of 2 dimensional N=(4,4) topological field theory defined on a discrete lattice by using the "orbifolding" and "deconstruction" methods. We show that our lattice model possesses the…

An important difference between high dimensional smooth manifolds and smooth 4-manifolds that in a 4-manifold it is not always possible to represent every middle dimensional homology class with a smoothly embedded sphere. This is true even…

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…

We obtain bounds on the least dimension of an affine space that can contain an $n$-dimensional submanifold without any pairs of parallel or intersecting tangent lines at distinct points. This problem is closely related to the generalized…

We prove that every piecewise linear manifold of dimension up to four on which a finite group acts by piecewise linear homeomorphisms admits a compatible smooth structure with respect to which the group acts smoothly. This solves a…

These notes are adapted from two talks given at the 2004 Clay Institute Summer School on Floer homology, gauge theory, and low dimensional topology at the Alfred Renyi Institute. We will quickly review what we do and do not know about the…

It is a classical important problem of differential topology by Thom; for a homology class of a compact manifold, can we realize this by a closed submanifold with no boundary? This is true if the degree of the class is smaller or equal to…

We study which lens spaces can bound smooth 4-manifolds with second Betti number one under various topological conditions. Specifically, we show that there are infinite families of lens spaces that bound compact, simply-connected, smooth…

With its boundary tracing out a link or knot in 3D, the Seifert surface is a 2D surface of core importance to topological classification. We propose the first-ever experimentally realistic setup where Seifert surfaces emerge as the boundary…

Let $\mathcal{Z}$ be a spin $4$-manifold carrying a parallel spinor and $M\hookrightarrow \mathcal{Z}$ a hypersurface. The second fundamental form of the embedding induces a flat metric connection on $TM$. Such flat connections satisfy a…

We show how the families Seiberg-Witten invariants of a family of smooth $4$-manifolds can be recovered from the families Bauer-Furuta invariant via a cohomological formula. We use this formula to deduce several properties of the families…

In spin geometry, traceless cyclic homogeneous Riemannian manifolds equipped with a homogeneous spin structure can be viewed as the simplest manifolds after Riemannian symmetric spin spaces. In this paper, we give some characterizations and…

A theorem of Mumford states that, on complex surfaces, any normal isolated singularity whose link is diffeomorphic to a sphere is actually a smooth point. While this property fails in higher dimensions, McLean asks whether the contact…

We consider mapping class groups \Gamma(M) = pi_0 Diff(M fix \partial M) of smooth compact simply connected oriented 4-manifolds M bounded by a collection of 3-spheres. We show that if M contains CP^2 (with either orientation) as a…