Related papers: Smooth structures on non-orientable $4$-manifolds …
Internal stabilization adds a trivial handle to an embedded surface in a coordinate chart. It is known that any pair of smoothly knotted surfaces in a simply-connected $4$-manifold become smoothly isotopic after sufficiently many internal…
The main result is that an s-cobordism (topological or smooth) of 4-manifolds has a product structure outside a ``core'' sub s-cobordism. These cores are arranged to have quite a bit of structure, for example they are smooth and abstractly…
These notes aim at a pedagogical introduction to recent work on deformation of spaces and deformation of vector bundles over them, which are relevant both in mathematics and in physics, notably monopole and instanton bundles. We first…
We show that there exist infinitely many pairwise distinct non-closed G_2-manifolds (some of which have holonomy full G_2) such that they admit co-oriented contact structures and have co-oriented contact submanifolds which are also…
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,…
Topology and geometry are deeply intertwined in the study of surfaces, though their interaction manifests differently in smooth and discrete settings. In the smooth category, a classical result asserts that any closed smooth surface…
We show that there exist smooth, simply connected, four-dimensional spin manifolds which do not admit Einstein metrics, but nonetheless satisfy the strict Hitchin-Thorpe inequality. Our construction makes use of the Bauer/Furuta cohomotopy…
We construct smooth 4-manifolds homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to CP^2+6CP^2-bar.
We investigate the physics of the E-string theory and its compactifications as well as their applications to four-dimensional topology. In particular, we compute the partition function of the topologically twisted theory on $M_4\times T^2$,…
The stable Andrews-Curtis conjecture in combinatorial group theory is the statement that every balanced presentation of the trivial group can be simplified to the trivial form by elementary moves corresponding to "handle-slides" together…
For every $n \geq 4$, we demonstrate the existence of non-isotopic smooth $(n-2)$-knots in $S^n$ with diffeomorphic traces by generalising the RBG link construction to all dimensions. Conversely, we prove that for every $n \geq 4$, the…
This note has two related but independent parts. Firstly, we prove a generalisation of a recent result of Gay on the smooth mapping class group of $S^4$. Secondly, we give an alternative proof of a consequence of work of Saeki, namely that…
We construct examples of non-smoothable surfaces in the $4$-sphere, thereby answering Question 4.32 on the K3 problem list. These surfaces are non-orientable and have knot group of order $2$, thus simultaneously answering Question 4.29(a)…
From a handlebody-theoretic perspective, the simplest compact, contractible 4-manifolds, other than the 4-ball, are Mazur manifolds. We produce the first pairs of Mazur manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. Our…
A fundamental result in 4-manifold topology asserts that any two exotic smooth structures on a simply-connected, closed 4-manifold differ by a cork twist: the operation of removing a compact, contractible, codimension-zero submanifold and…
We show that two orientable, four-dimensional folded symplectic toric manifolds are isomorphic provided that their orbit spaces have trivial degree-two integral cohomology and there exists a diffeomorphism of the orbit spaces (as manifolds…
We present an infinite sequence of smooth embeddings of a connected sum of 6 projective planes in the 4-sphere, which are all ambient homeomorphic, but pairwise ambient non-diffeomorphic. The double covers of the 4-sphere ramified along…
Given a simply-connected closed 4-manifold $X$ and a smoothly embedded oriented surface $\Sigma$, various constructions based on Fintushel-Stern knot surgery have produced new surfaces in $X$ that are pairwise homeomorphic to $\Sigma$, but…
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…
An obstruction theory for representing homotopy classes of surfaces in 4-manifolds by immersions with pairwise disjoint images is developed, using the theory of non-repeating Whitney towers. The accompanying higher-order intersection…