Related papers: Trace Embeddings from Zero Surgery Homeomorphisms

The unknot U in S^4 has non-unique smooth spanning 3-balls up to isotopy fixing U. Equivalently there are properly embedded non-separating 3-balls in S^1xB^3 not properly isotopic to 1xB^3. More generally there exist non-separating…

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…

In a small simply-connected closed 4-manifold, we construct infinitely many pairs of exotic codimension-$1$ submanifolds with diffeomorphic complements that remain exotic after any number of stabilizations by $ S^2 \times S^2$. We also give…

In this article, we construct the first example of a simply connected minimal symplectic 4-manifold homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to 3CP^2#7CP^2b. We also construct the first exotic symplectic structure on CP^2#5CP^2b.

We extend a construction of Stipsicz-Szab\'{o} of infinitely many irreducible exotic smooth structures of some closed four-manifolds with even $b_2^+$ and fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z}$. We use the double node surgery and…

Motivated by Stipsicz and Szab\'{o}'s exotic 4-manifolds with b_2^+=3 and b_2^-=8, we construct a family of simply connected smooth 4-manifolds with b_2^+=3 and b_2^-=8. As a corollary, we conclude that the topological 4-manifold…

We show that no exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$ admits a complete Riemannian metric with uniformly positive isotropic curvature and with bounded geometry. This is essentially a corollary of the main result in [Hu1], and was stated in [Hu2] without…

We show that there exists a link with 2 components which is not smoothly slice in $\mathbb{CP}^2 \# \overline{\mathbb{CP}^2}$. By contrast, it is well-known that every knot (i.e., link with 1 component) is smoothly slice therein. Our proof…

Freedman and Krushkal showed that if the surgery conjecture and the $s$-cobordism conjecture hold for all topological 4-manifolds, then every link with pairwise zero linking numbers is topologically round handle slice. Kim, Powell, and…

We introduce a general procedure called `reverse engineering' that can be used to construct infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds in a given homeomorphism type. As one of the applications of this technique, we produce an infinite family…

Kreck's modified surgery theory reduces the classification of closed, connected 4-manifolds, up to connect sum with some number of copies of $S^2\times S^2$, to a series of bordism questions. We implement this in the case of unorientable…

Suppose that $N_1$ and $N_2$ are closed smooth manifolds of dimension $n$ that are homeomorphic. We prove that the spaces of smooth knots $Emb(S^1, N_1)$ and $Emb(S^1, N_2)$ have the same homotopy $(2n-7)$-type. In the 4-dimensional case…

We show that there is no algorithm to decide whether or not a given 4-manifold is homeomorphic to the connected sum of 12 copies of S^2 \times S^2.

Manolescu correction terms are numerical invariants of homology three-spheres arising from $\mathrm{Pin}(2)$-equivariant Seiberg-Witten theory that contain information about homology cobordism. We discuss several constraints on these…

Let $R$ be a closed, oriented topological 4-manifold whose Euler characteristic and signature are denoted by $e$ and $\sigma$. We show that if $R$ has order two $\pi_1$, odd intersection form, and $2e + 3\sigma \geq 0$, then for all but…

Given a closed four-manifold $X$ with an indefinite intersection form, we consider smoothly embedded surfaces in $X \setminus $int$(B^4)$, with boundary a knot $K \subset S^3$. We give several methods to bound the genus of such surfaces in…

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…

We construct a number of topologically trivial but smoothly non-trivial families of embeddings of 3-manifolds in 4-manifolds. These include embeddings of homology spheres in $S^4$ that are not isotopic but have diffeomorphic complements,…

We prove that the double branched cover of a twist-roll spun knot in $S^4$ is smoothly preserved when four twists are added, and that the double branched cover of a twist-roll spun knot connected sum with a trivial projective plane is…

We introduce a new generalization of Gompf nuclei and give applications. We construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures for a large class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary, regarding topological invariants. We prove that a large…