Related papers: Definite four-manifolds with exotic smooth structu…

We point out that recent constructions of inequivalent smooth structures yield a manufacturing procedure of infinite sets of pairwise smoothly non-isotopic nullhomologous 2-tori and spheres inside a myriad of 4-manifolds. The corresponding…

We study some symplectic geometric aspects of rationally connected 4-folds. As a corollary, we prove that any smooth projective 4-fold symplectic deformation equivalent to a Fano 4-fold of pseudo-index at least 2 or a rationally connected…

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…

Motivated by a construction of Fintushel and Stern, we show that the topological 4--manifold $CP^2#5{\bar CP^2}$ supports infinitely many distinct smooth structures.

Coassociative 4-folds are a particular class of 4-dimensional submanifolds which are defined in a 7-dimensional manifold M with a G_2 structure given by a `positive' differential 3-form, sometimes called G_2-form. Assuming that a G_2-form…

We prove that a positive definite smooth four-manifold with $b_2^+ \geq 2$ and having either no 1-handles or no 3-handles cannot admit a symplectic structure.

Kreck and Schafer produced the first examples of stably diffeomorphic closed smooth 4-manifolds which are not homotopy equivalent. They were constructed by applying the doubling construction to 2-complexes over certain finite abelian groups…

For any finitely presentable group $G$, we show the existence of an isolated complex surface singularity link which admits infinitely many exotic Stein fillings such that the fundamental group of each filling is isomorphic to $G$. We also…

We show that two closed, connected $4$-manifolds with finite fundamental groups are $\mathbb{CP}^2$-stably homeomorphic if and only if their quadratic $2$-types are stably isomorphic and their Kirby-Siebenmann invariant agrees.

We show that the virtual second Betti number of a finitely generated, residually free group $G$ is finite if and only if $G$ is either free, free abelian or the fundamental group of a closed surface. We also prove a similar statement in…

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…

In this paper we construct a family of simply connected, spin, non-complex, symplectic 4-manifolds which cover all but finitely many allowed lattice points $(\chi, c)$ lying in $0 \leq c \leq 8.76\chi$. Furthermore, as a corollary, we prove…

Smooth manifolds have been always understood intuitively as spaces with an affine geometry on the infinitesimal scale. In Synthetic Differential Geometry this can be made precise by showing that a smooth manifold carries a natural structure…

A trisection of a smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifold is a decomposition into three 4-dimensional 1-handlebodies meeting pairwise in 3-dimensional 1-handlebodies, with triple intersection a closed surface. The fundamental groups of the…

In this paper, an explicit classification result for certain 5-manifolds with fundamental group Z/2 is obtained. These manifolds include total spaces of circle bundles over simply-connected 4-manifolds.

If a (possibly finite) compact Lie group acts effectively, locally linearly, and homologically trivially on a closed, simply-connected four-manifold with second Betti number at least three, then it must be isomorphic to a subgroup of S^1 x…

We show that, if a rational homology 3-sphere $Y$ bounds a positive definite smooth 4-manifold, then there are finitely many negative definite lattices, up to the stable-equivalence, which can be realized as the intersection form of a…

Singular fibrations generalize achiral Lefschetz fibrations of 4-manifolds over surfaces while sharing some of their properties. For instance, relatively minimal singular fibrations are determined by their monodromy. We explain how to…

We describe smooth rational projective algebraic surfaces over an algebraically closed field of characteristic different from 2 which contain $n \ge \b_2-2$ disjoint smooth rational curves with self-intersection -2, where $\b_2$ is the…

A short survey of exotic smooth structutes on 4-manifolds is given with a special emphasis on the corresponding cork structures. Along the way we discuss some of the more recent results in this direction, obtained jointly with R.Matveyev,…