Related papers: Homology spheres bounding acyclic smooth manifolds…

We show that any closed oriented 3-manifold can be topologically embedded in some simply-connected closed symplectic 4-manifold, and that it can be made a smooth embedding after one stabilization. As a corollary of the proof we show that…

In this article, using combinatorial techniques of mapping class groups, we show that a Stein fillable integral homology $3$-sphere supported by an open book decomposition with page a $4$-holed sphere admits a unique Stein filling up to…

We show that standard cyclic actions on Brieskorn homology 3-spheres with non-empty fixed set do not extend smoothly to any contractible smooth 4-manifold it may bound. The quotient of any such extension would be an acyclic $4$-manifold…

A strategy for constructing an embedded sphere in a 4-manifold realizing a given homology class which has been successfully applied in the past is to represent the class as a first step stably by an embedded sphere, i.e. after adding…

For each n greater than 7 we explicitly construct a sequence of Stein manifolds diffeomorphic to complex affine space of dimension n so that there is no algorithm to tell us in general whether a given such Stein manifold is symplectomorphic…

A conjecture due to Gompf asserts that no nontrivial Brieskorn homology sphere admits a pseudoconvex embedding in ${\mathbb C}^2$, with either orientation. A related question asks whether every compact contractible 4-manifold admits the…

Given an acyclic map $X\to Y$ of closed manifolds dimension $d$, we study the relationship between the embeddings of $Y$ in $S^{n}$ with those of $X$ in $S^{n}$ when $n-d \ge 3$. The approach taken here is to first solve the Poincar\'e…

In this paper we survey results on the existence of holomorphic embeddings and immersions of Stein manifolds into complex manifolds. Most results pertain to proper maps into Stein manifolds. We include a new result saying that every…

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…

We develop the theory of the diagrammatics of surface cross sections to prove that there are an infinite number of homology 3-spheres smoothly embeddable in a homology 4-sphere but not in a homotopy 4-sphere. Our primary obstruction comes…

We will show that the cotangent bundle of a manifold whose free loopspace homology grows exponentially is not symplectomorphic to any smooth affine variety. We will also show that the unit cotangent bundle of such a manifold is not Stein…

By taking the complements of embeddings of sphere plumbings in connected sums of $\mathbb{C} P^2$, we construct examples of simply connected four-manifolds with lens space boundary and $b_2 = 1$. The resulting boundaries include many lens…

An invariant of orientable 3-manifolds is defined by taking the minimum $n$ such that a given 3-manifold embeds in the connected sum of $n$ copies of $S^2 \times S^2$, and we call this $n$ the embedding number of the 3-manifold. We give…

It is one of the most important facts in 4-dimensional topology that not every spherical homology class of a 4-manifold can be represented by an embedded sphere. In 1978, M. Freedman and R. Kirby showed that in the simply connected case,…

In this paper we obtain the following results: (1) Any compact Stein surface with boundary embeds naturally into a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. (2) There exists a minimal elliptic fibration over the 2-disk, which is not…

For smooth embeddings of an integral homology 3-sphere in the 6-sphere, we define an integer invariant in terms of their Seifert surfaces. Our invariant gives a bijection between the set of smooth isotopy classes of such embeddings and the…

We say that a topologically embedded 3-sphere in a smoothing of Euclidean 4-space is a barrier provided, roughly, no diffeomorphism of the 4-manifold moves the 3-sphere off itself. In this paper we construct infinitely many one parameter…

In this note we study whether specific elements in the second homology of specific simply connected closed $4$-manifolds can be represented by smooth or topologically flat embedded spheres.

We investigate constraints on embeddings of a non-orientable surface in a $4$-manifold with the homology of $M \times I$, where $M$ is a rational homology $3$-sphere. The constraints take the form of inequalities involving the genus and…

There is an intrinsic notion of what it means for a contact manifold to be the smooth boundary of a Stein manifold. The same concept has another more extrinsic formulation, which is often used as a convenient working hypothesis. We give a…