Related papers: Multisections of 4-manifolds
This paper studies properly embedded surfaces in the 4-ball that are exotically knotted (i.e., topologically but not smoothly isotopic), and leverages this local phenomenon to study surfaces in larger 4-manifolds. The main results provide a…
This article presents the constructions of new infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds with the property that any two manifolds in the same family are homeomorphic and, from their construction, seem to be quite different, but cannot be…
We produce examples of pairwise non-diffeomorphic closed irreducible 4-manifolds with non-trivial free abelian fundamental group of rank less than three and small Euler characteristic. These exotic smooth structures become standard after…
We study the possibility of realizing exotic smooth structures on punctured simply connected $4$-manifolds as leaves of a codimension one foliation on a compact manifold. In particular, we show the existence of uncountably many smooth open…
We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…
We prove that a compact smooth 4-manifold admits generalized complex structures of odd type if and only if it has a transversely holomorphic 2-foliation. Consequently, there exist generalized complex structures of odd type on a circle…
The adjunction inequality is a key tool for bounding the genus of smoothly embedded surfaces in 4-manifolds. Using gauge-theoretic invariants, many versions of this inequality have been established for both closed surfaces and surfaces with…
Let $G$ be a finite group, and let $X$ be a smooth, orientable, connected, closed 4-dimensional $G$-manifold. Let $\mathcal{S}$ be a smooth, embedded, $G$-invariant surface in $X$. We introduce the concept of a $G$-equivariant trisection of…
We construct noncomplex smooth 4-manifolds which admit genus-2 Lefschetz fibrations over S^2. The fibrations are necessarily hyperelliptic, and the resulting 4-manifolds are not even homotopy equivalent to complex surfaces. Furthermore,…
We initiate a study of positive multisections of Lefschetz fibrations via positive factorizations in framed mapping class groups of surfaces. Using our methods, one can effectively capture various interesting symplectic surfaces in…
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.…
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 introduce bridge trisections of knotted surfaces in the four-sphere. This description is inspired by the work of Gay and Kirby on trisections of four-manifolds and extends the classical concept of bridge splittings of links in the…
The author recently proved the existence of an infinite order cork: a compact, contractible submanifold $C$ of a 4-manifold and an infinite order diffeomorphism $f$ of $\partial C$ such that cutting out $C$ and regluing it by distinct…
A Heegaard diagram for a 3-manifold is regarded as a pair of simplexes in the complex of curves on a surface and a Heegaard splitting as a pair of subcomplexes generated by the equivalent diagrams. We relate geometric and combinatorial…
Dimension 4 is the first dimension in which exotic smooth manifold pairs appear -- manifolds which are topologically the same but for which there is no smooth deformation of one into the other. Whilst smooth and triangulated 4-manifolds do…
We show that, under a certain condition, contact 5-manifolds can `coarsely' distinguish smooth structures on compact Stein 4-manifolds via contact open books. We also give a simple sufficient condition for an infinite family of Stein…
We prove that for every natural number k there are simply connected topological four-manifolds which have at leat k distinct smooth structures supporting Einstein metrics, and also have infinitely many distinct smooth structures not…
The purpose of the present paper is twofold: firstly to extend to non-orientable compact 4-manifolds the notion of gem-induced trisection, directly obtained from colored triangulations (or, equivalently, from colored graphs encoding them,…
We describe some theoretical results on triangulations of surfaces and we develop a theory on roots, decompositions and genus-surfaces. We apply this theory to describe an algorithm to list all triangulations of closed surfaces with at most…