Related papers: Smooth structures on non-orientable $4$-manifolds …

A 2-sphere embedded in the 4-sphere invariant under a circle action is called a branched twist spin. A branched twist spin is constructed from a 1-knot in the 3-sphere and a pair of coprime integers uniquely. In this paper, we study, for…

Given an SO(3)-bundle with connection, the associated two-sphere bundle carries a natural closed 2-form. Asking that this be symplectic gives a curvature inequality first considered by Reznikov. We study this inequality in the case when the…

In this paper we introduce a technique, called rim surgery, which can change a smooth embedding of an orientable surface of positive genus and nonnegative self-intersection in a smooth 4-manifold while leaving the topological embedding…

We show that an odd dimensional closed manifold with positive curvature cannot contain an incompressible real projective plane in the sense that there is no map of the projective plane into the manifold which is nontrivial on both first and…

We study exotic smoothings of open 4-manifolds using the minimal genus function and its analog for end homology. While traditional techniques in open 4-manifold smoothing theory give no control of minimal genera, we make progress by using…

For a smoothing Y of a 2-dimensional cyclic quotient singularity X, we construct a simple handle decomposition of Y by using a particular birational map from Y to the projective plane. The manifold Y is built up from the product of an…

The purpose of this article is twofold. First we outline a general construction scheme for producing simply-connected minimal symplectic 4-manifolds with small Euler characteristics. Using this scheme, we illustrate how to obtain…

A 4-manifold is constructed with some curious metric properties; or maybe it is many 4-manifolds masquerading as one, which would explain why it looks curious. Anyway, knots in the 3-sphere with complete finite volume hyperbolic metrics on…

We present a pair of smooth fiber bundles over the circle with a common $4$-dimensional fiber with the following properties: (1) their total spaces are diffeomorphic to each other; (2) they are isomorphic to each other as topological fiber…

A basic arbitrariness in the determination of the topology of a manifold at the Planck length is discussed. An explicit example is given of a `smooth' change in topology from the 2-sphere to the 2-torus through a sequence of noncommuting…

We describe noncommutative geometric aspects of twisted deformations, in particular of the spheres in Connes and Landi [8] and in Connes and Dubois Violette [7], by using the differential and integral calculus on these spaces that is…

We calculate the Seiberg-Witten invariants of branched covers of prime degree, where the branch locus consists of embedded spheres. Aside from the formula itself, our calculations give rise to some new constraints on configurations of…

This paper considers aspects of 4-manifold topology from the point of view of the null cone of a neutral metric, a point of view we call neutral causal topology. In particular, we construct and investigate neutral 4-manifolds with null…

Let M be either CP^2#3CP^2bar or 3CP^2#5CP^2bar. We construct the first example of a simply-connected symplectic 4-manifold that is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to M.

We introduce a method to detect exotic surfaces without explicitly using a smooth 4-manifold invariant or an invariant of a 4-manifold-surface pair in the construction. Our main tools are two versions of families (Seiberg-Witten)…

Let $W$ be a compact smooth $4$-manifold that deformation retract to a PL embedded closed surface. One can arrange the embedding to have at most one non-locally-flat point, and near the point the topology of the embedding is encoded in the…

Techniques for constructing codimension 2 embeddings and immersions of the 2 and 3-fold branched covers of the 3 and 4-dimensional spheres are presented. These covers are in braided form, and it is in this sense that they are folded. More…

This article presents families of 7-dimensional closed and simply-connected manifolds and fold maps on them such that squares of 2nd integral cohomology classes may not be divisible by 2. Fold maps are higher dimensional versions of Morse…

An important difference between high dimensional smooth manifolds and smooth 4-manifolds that in a 4-manifold it is not always possible to represent every middle dimensional homology class with a smoothly embedded sphere. This is true even…

This article analyzes the interplay between symplectic geometry in dimension four and the invariants for smooth four-manifolds constructed using holomorphic triangles introduced in math.SG/0110169. Specifically, we establish a non-vanishing…