Related papers: Aspherical 4-manifolds with elementary amenable fu…
Let $M$ be a simply connected closed $4$-manifold. It is proved that any (possibly finite) compact Lie group acting effectively and homologically trivially on $M$ by homeomorphisms is an abelian group of rank at most two. As applications,…
Main Theorem (3.3): Let $M$ be a compact four-dimensional manifold either with curvature, positive on complex isotropic two-planes, or self-dual of positive scalar curvature. If $\pi_1 (M)$ admits a nontrivial unitary representation, and…
We prove that every locally conformally flat metric on a closed, oriented hyperbolic 4-manifold with scalar curvature bounded below by -12 satisfies Schoen's conjecture. We also classify all closed Riemannian 4-manifolds of positive scalar…
We show that closed, connected 4-manifolds up to connected sum with copies of the complex projective plane are classified in terms of the fundamental group, the orientation character and an extension class involving the second homotopy…
This is a survey on known results and open problems about closed aspherical manifolds, i.e., connected closed manifolds whose universal coverings are contractible. Many examples come from certain kinds of non-positive curvature conditions.…
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…
We survey recent developments which led to the proof of the Benson-Gordon conjecture on K\"ahler quotients of solvable Lie groups. In addition we prove that the Albanese morphism of a K\"ahler manifold which is a homotopy torus is a…
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 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…
For each nonnegative integer m we show that any closed, oriented topological four-manifold with fundamental group Z_{4m+2} and odd intersection form, with possibly seven exceptions, either admits no smooth structure or admits infinitely…
We characterize the quasiprojective groups that appear as fundamental groups of compact $3$-manifolds (with or without boundary). We also characterize all closed $3$-manifolds that admit good complexifications. These answer questions of…
Mapping class groups of Haken 3-manifolds enjoy many of the homological finiteness properties of mapping class groups of 2-manifolds of finite type. For example, H(M) has a torsionfree subgroup of finite index, which is geometrically finite…
A smooth five-dimensional s-cobordism becomes a smooth product if stabilized by a finite number n of $S^2xS^2x[0,1]$'s. We show that for amenable fundamental groups, the minimal n is subextensive in covers, i.e., n(cover)/index(cover) has…
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 aspherical manifolds produced via the relative strict hyperbolization of polyhedra enjoy many group-theoretic and topological properties of open finite volume negatively pinched manifolds, including relative hyperbolicity,…
We classify compact oriented $5$-manifolds with free fundamental group and $\pi_{2}$ a torsion free abelian group in terms of the second homotopy group considered as $\pi_1$-module, the cup product on the second cohomology of the universal…
We give some rigidity theorems for an n$(\geq4)$-dimensional compact Riemannian manifold with harmonic Weyl curvature, positive scalar curvature and positive constant $\sigma_2$. Moreover, when $n=4,$ we prove that a 4-dimensional compact…
In this paper we study the topology of conformally compact Einstein 4-manifolds. When the conformal infinity has positive Yamabe invariant and the renormalized volume is also positive we show that the conformally compact Einstein 4-manifold…
A central theme in Riemannian geometry is understanding the relationships between the curvature and the topology of a Riemannian manifold. Positive isotropic curvature (PIC) is a natural and much studied curvature condition which includes…
In this paper, we study the compactness of a boundary value problem for hyperkaehler 4-manifolds. We show that under certain topological conditions and the positive mean curvature condition on the boundary, a sequence of hyperkaehler…