Related papers: Smooth structures on four-manifolds with finite cy…
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…
We provide information on diffeotopy groups of exotic smoothings of punctured 4-manifolds, extending previous results on diffeotopy groups of exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$'s. In particular, we prove that for a smoothable 4-manifold $M$ and for a…
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.
We construct infinitely many smooth 4-manifolds which are homotopy equivalent to $S^2$ but do not admit a spine, i.e., a piecewise-linear embedding of $S^2$ which realizes the homotopy equivalence. This is the remaining case in the…
We study the possibility of realizing exotic smooth structures on punctured simply connected $4$-manifolds as leaves of a codimension one foliation on a compact manifold. In particular, we show the existence of uncountably many smooth open…
We obtain constraints on the topology of families of smooth $4$-manifolds arising from a finite dimensional approximation of the families Seiberg-Witten monopole map. Amongst other results these constraints include a families generalisation…
Associated to every complete affine 3-manifold M with nonsolvable fundamental group is a noncompact hyperbolic surface S. We classify such complete affine structures when Sigma is homeomorphic to a three-holed sphere. In particular, for…
We provide an infinite family of diffeomorphic symplectic forms on ruled surfaces, which are pairwise non-isotopic. This answers a uniqueness question regarding symplectic structures up to isotopy on closed symplectic four-manifolds.
We introduce a simple cut-and-paste mechanism to construct both orientable and nonorientable four-manifolds from a given initial one. This mechanism alters the fundamental group while preserving other essential topological invariants. It…
We describe a procedure to construct infinite sets of pairwise smoothly inequivalent 2-spheres in simply connected 4-manifolds, which are topologically isotopic and whose complement has a prescribed fundamental group that satisfies some…
We define cusp-decomposable manifolds and prove smooth rigidity within this class of manifolds. These manifolds generally do not admit a nonpositively curved metric but can be decomposed into pieces that are diffeomorphic to finite volume,…
We classify the possible elementary amenable fundamental groups of compact aspherical 4-manifolds with boundary and conclude that they are either polycyclic or solvable Baumslag- Solitar. Since these groups are good and satisfy the…
We prove that, under a simple condition on the cohomology ring, every closed 4-manifold has mod 2 Seiberg-Witten simple type. This result shows that there exists a large class of topological 4-manifolds such that all smooth structures have…
We prove that there are infinitely many pairs of homeomorphic non-diffeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds, such that in each pair one manifold admits an Einstein metric and the other does not. We also show that there are closed 4-manifolds with…
In this short note, we present a construction of new symplectic 4-manifolds with non-negative signature using the complex surfaces on Bogomolov-Miyaoka-Yau line $c_1^2 = 9\chi_h$, the fake projective planes and Cartwright-Steger surfaces.…
We investigate asymptotically flat manifolds with cone structure at infinity. We show that any such manifold M has a finite number of ends. For simply connected ends we classify all possible cones at infinity, except for the 4-dimensional…
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…
In this article we construct a new family of simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds with $b_2^+ =1$ and $c_1^2 =2$ which are not diffeomorphic to rational surfaces by using rational blow-down technique. As a corollary, we conclude that a…
We study the structure induced on a smooth manifold by a continuous selection of smooth functions. In case such selection is suitably generic, it provides a stratification of the manifold, whose strata are algebraically defined smooth…
We produce infinitely many distinct irreducible smooth 4-manifolds homeomorphic to #(2m+1)(CP^2 # -CP^2) and #(2n+1)(S^2 x S^2), respectively, for each m>3 and n>4. These provide the smallest exotic closed simply connected 4-manifolds with…