Related papers: On four-manifolds without 1- and 3-handles

In this paper we give explicit, handle-by-handle constructions of concave symplectic fillings of all closed, oriented contact 3-manifolds. These constructions combine recent results of Giroux relating contact structures and open book…

We prove that a compact 4-manifold which supports a circle-invariant fat SO(3)-bundle is diffeomorphic to either S^4 or CP^2-bar. The proof involves studying the resulting Hamiltonian circle action on an associated symplectic 6-manifold.…

Two criteria for a closed connected definite 4-manifold with infinite cyclic fundamental group to be TOP-split are given. One criterion extends a sufficient condition made in a previous paper. The result is equivalent to a purely algebraic…

This article proves that if M is a smooth manifold of dimension at least four, then for generic choice of metric on M, all prime parametrized minimal surfaces in M are free of branch points and lie on nondegenerate critical submanifolds for…

For each integer $n$ we construct a simply connected $4$-manifold $X$ admitting a smoothly embedded surface $\Sigma$ of self intersection number $n$ such that the complement of the surface has non-trivial fundamental group. This answers a…

A multisection, or $n$-section, of an $(n + 1)$-dimensional manifold is a decomposition of this manifold into $n$ $1$-handlebodies of dimension $n+1$, such that all these handlebodies intersect along a closed surface, and every…

From any 4-dimensional oriented handlebody X without 3- and 4-handles and with b_2>0, we construct arbitrary many compact Stein 4-manifolds which are mutually homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to each other, so that their topological…

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…

Four observations compose the main results of this note. The first records the existence of a smoothly embedded 2-sphere $S$ inside $\mathbb{R} P^2\times S^2$ such that performing a Gluck twist on $S$ produces a manifold $Y$ that is…

We show that for any connected smooth manifold $M$ of dimension different from $3$ the restriction of the compact-open topology to the diffeomorphism group of $M$ is minimal, i.e. the group does not admit a strictly coarser Hausdorff group…

We introduce a new class of possibly noncompact n-dimensional manifolds without boundary associated to finite data which we call topological automata. This class is large enough to contain many interesting examples of open 2-dimensional and…

Given a Morse 2-function $f: X^4 \to S^2$, we give minimal conditions on the fold curves and fibers so that $X^4$ and $f$ can be reconstructed from a certain combinatorial diagram attached to $S^2$. Additional remarks are made in other…

Special generic maps are higher dimensional versions of Morse functions with exactly two singular points, characterizing spheres topologically except $4$-dimensional cases: in these cases standard spheres are characterized. Canonical…

It is proved that an arbitrary finite group acting locally linearly, homologically trivially, and pseudofreely on a closed, simply connected 4-manifold must in fact be cyclic and act semifreely, provided the second betti number of the…

Let $M$ be a compact oriented simply-connected manifold of dimension at least 8. Assume $M$ is equipped with a torsion-free semi-free circle action with isolated fixed points. We prove $M$ has a perfect invariant Morse-Smale function. The…

This note studies the Burnside problem for homeomorphism groups of compact connected manifolds. For surfaces, we prove that the identity component of the homeomorphism group is torsion-free precisely when the surface is not the sphere,…

The main theorem of the paper shows that a smooth manifold which is homeomorphic to S^2xS^2 and has nonvanishing Ozsvath-Szabo invariant does not admit a perfect Morse function. I am withdrawing the paper because it is unclear to me if such…

An invariant of orientable 3-manifolds is defined by taking the minimum $n$ such that a given 3-manifold embeds in the connected sum of $n$ copies of $S^2 \times S^2$, and we call this $n$ the embedding number of the 3-manifold. We give…

The author recently proved the existence of an infinite order cork: a compact, contractible submanifold $C$ of a 4-manifold and an infinite order diffeomorphism $f$ of $\partial C$ such that cutting out $C$ and regluing it by distinct…

We classify closed, simply-connected, non-negatively curved 6-manifolds of almost maximal symmetry rank up to equivariant diffeomorphism.