Related papers: Exotic diffeomorphisms on $4$-manifolds with $b_2^…
This article presents the constructions of new infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds with the property that any two manifolds in the same family are homeomorphic and, from their construction, seem to be quite different, but cannot be…
Using Real Seiberg--Witten theory, Miyazawa introduced an invariant of certain 4-manifolds with involution and used this invariant to construct infinitely many exotic involutions on $\mathbb{CP}^2$ and infinitely many exotic smooth…
We define a diffeomorphism invariant of smooth 4-manifolds which we can estimate for many smoothings of R^4 and other smooth 4-manifolds. Using this invariant we can show that uncountably many smoothings of R^4 support no Stein structure.…
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…
We construct an infinite family of mutually non-diffeomorphic irreducible smooth structures on the topological 4-manifold $S^2 \times S^2$.
We produce infinite families of exotic actions of finite cyclic groups on simply connected smooth 4-manifolds with nontrivial Seiberg-Witten invariants.
We explicitly construct genus-2 Lefschetz fibrations whose total spaces are minimal symplectic 4-manifolds homeomorphic to complex rational surfaces CP^2 # p (-CP^2) for p=7, 8, 9, and to 3 CP^2 #q (-CP^2) for q =12,...,19. Complementarily,…
Among the simplest invariants of the sporadic finite simple groups are their outer automorphism groups. For 12 of the 26 possible isomorphism types of a sporadic simple group G, the outer automorphism group Out(G) has order 2, and in the…
We give constraints on smooth families of 4-manifolds with boundary using Manolescu's Seiberg-Witten Floer stable homotopy type, provided that the fiberwise restrictions of the families to the boundaries are trivial families of 3-manifolds.…
This paper is concerned with the problem of stable diffeomorphism classification of 4-manifolds obtained using the surgery on loops. The main theorem states that under the assumption that the normal 1-type of two 4-manifolds in question is…
For a non-orientable closed surface standardly embedded in the 4-sphere, a diffeomorphism over this surface is extendable if and only if this diffeomorphism preserves the Guillou-Marin quadratic form of this embedded surface.
Despite spectacular advances in defining invariants for simply connected smooth and symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds and the discovery of effective surgical techniques, we still have been unable to classify simply connected smooth…
We distinguish diffeomorphism types of relative trisections using a ``capping'' operation, which yields a trisection diagram of a closed 4-manifold from a relative trisection diagram. Using this operation, we give various examples of…
We prove a surgery formula for the ordinary Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth $4$-manifolds with $b_1 =1$. Our formula expresses the Seiberg-Witten invariants of the manifold after the surgery, in terms of the original Seiberg-Witten…
Recent discoveries in differential topology are reviewed in light of their possible implications for spacetime models and related subjects in theoretical physics. Although not often noted, a particular smoothness (differentiability)…
We study closed, oriented 4-manifolds whose fundamental group is that of a closed, oriented, aspherical 3-manifold. We show that two such 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic if and only if they have the same w_2-type and their equivariant…
We introduce new methods in pseudo-isotopy and embedding space theory. As an application we introduce an invariant that detects nontrivial loops of embedded 2-spheres in $S^{2} \times S^{2}$ and in connected sums of $S^{2} \times S^{2}$.…
In this paper, an update on the classification of smooth weak Fano threefolds with Picard number two and small anti-canonical maps is given. Geometric constructions are provided for previously open numerical cases by blowing up certain…
This short survey, which was written to accompany a minicourse at the BIRS conference "Topology in dimension 4.5", concerns invariants of knotted $2$-spheres in $S^4$, also known as $2$-knots. It covers invariants extracted from the…
It is shown that any finite list of smooth closed simply-connected 4-manifolds homeomorphic to a given one X can be obtained by removing a single compact contractible submanifold (or cork) from X, and then regluing it by powers of a…