Related papers: Horizontal decompositions, I
We complete the classification of the smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifolds having Euler characteristic less than four and a horizontal handlebody decomposition of genus one. We use the classification result to find a large family of…
We present a handlebody construction of small symplectic caps, and hence of small closed symplectic 4-manifolds. We use this to construct handlebody descriptions of symplectic embeddings of rational homology balls in…
We prove that there are rational homology balls $B_p$ smoothly embedded in the $2$-handlebodies associated to certain knots. Furthermore we show that, if we rationally blow up the $2$-handlebody along the embedded rational homology ball…
We introduce the concept of a handlebody decomposition of a 3-manifold, a generalization of a Heegaard splitting, or a trisection. We show that two handlebody decompositions of a closed orientable 3-manifold are stably equivalent. As an…
A theorem on the existence of the unique minimal topologic handle decomposition of differentiable simply connected five-dimensional manifolds is proved. For a decomposition of this sort, the number of handles of each index is given.
In this article, we study a class of closed connected orientable PL $4$-manifolds admitting a semi-simple crystallization and which have an infinite cyclic fundamental group. We show that the manifold in the class admits a handle…
Recently Gay and Kirby described a new decomposition of smooth closed $4$-manifolds called a trisection. This paper generalises Heegaard splittings of $3$-manifolds and trisections of $4$-manifolds to all dimensions, using triangulations as…
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 article we show that every closed orientable smooth $4$--manifold admits a smooth embedding in the complex projective $3$--space.
In this paper we study colored triangulations of compact PL 4-manifolds with empty or connected boundary which induce handle decompositions lacking in 1-handles or in 1- and 3-handles, thus facing also the problem, posed by Kirby, of the…
This paper continues the study of decompositions of a smooth 4-manifold into two handlebodies with handles of index $\leq2$. Part I gave existence results in terms of spines and chain complexes over the fundamental group of the ambient…
We show that closed, connected 4-manifolds up to connected sum with copies of the complex projective plane are classified in terms of the fundamental group, the orientation character and an extension class involving the second homotopy…
We give a method for obtaining a handle decomposition of an $n$-manifold if the manifold is given by isometric side-pairings of a polyhedron in $\en$, $\sn$ or $\hn$. Every cycle of $k$-faces on the polyhedron corresponds to an…
First steps towards a classification of irreducible symplectic 4-folds whose integral 2-cohomology with 4-tuple cup product is isomorphic to that of Hilb^2(K3). We prove that any such 4-fold deforms to an irreducible symplectic 4-fold of…
A multisection of a 4-manifold is a decomposition into 1-handlebodies intersecting pairwise along 3-dimensional handlebodies or along a central closed surface; this generalizes the Gay-Kirby trisections. We show how to compute the twisted…
We prove that there are homology three-spheres that bound definite four-manifolds, but any such bounding four-manifold must be built out of many handles. The argument uses the homology cobordism invariant $\Gamma$ from instanton Floer…
We construct explicit maximal symplectic packings of minimal rational and ruled symplectic 4-manifolds by few balls in a very simple way.
We give a characterization of closed, simply connected, rationally elliptic 6-manifolds in terms of their rational cohomology rings and a partial classification of their real cohomology rings. We classify rational, real and complex homotopy…
In this paper, we consider decompositions of closed orientable 3-manifolds with more than 3 handlebodies, where the union of intersections of handlebodies is a multibranched surface. We define stabilization operations for such…
This paper is the second part of our work on 4-dimensional 2-handlebodies. In the first part (arXiv:math.GT/0407032) it is shown that up to certain set of local moves, connected simple coverings of B^4 branched over ribbon surfaces,…