Related papers: Dax invariants, light bulbs, and isotopies of symp…

The purpose of this paper is to present some results on the existence of homologous, nonisotopic symplectic or lagrangian surfaces embedded in a simply connected symplectic 4-dimensional manifold.

We compute in many classes of examples the first potentially interesting homotopy group of the space of embeddings of either an arc or a circle into a manifold $M$ of dimension $d\geq4$. In particular, if $M$ is a simply connected…

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 study symplectic surfaces in ruled symplectic 4-manifolds which are disjoint from a given symplectic section. As a consequence we see that, in any symplectic 4-manifold, two homologous symplectic surfaces which are sufficiently C^0 close…

We present new smoothing techniques for topologically embedded surfaces in smooth 4-manifolds, which give topological isotopy to a smooth surface. As applications, we prove "topological = smooth" results in dimension 4 for certain disks and…

We construct infinitely many smooth oriented 4-manifolds containing pairs of homotopic, smoothly embedded 2-spheres that are not topologically isotopic, but that are equivalent by an ambient diffeomorphism inducing the identity on homology.…

We give an overview of various recent results concerning the topology of symplectic 4-manifolds and singular plane curves, using branched covers and isotopy problems as a unifying theme. While this paper does not contain any new results, we…

Let f, g be two homotopic smooth embeddings of a closed surface in a closed oriented 5-dimensional manifold. We show that if f admits a common algebraic dual 3-sphere, or if the fundamental group of the ambient space is trivial, then f and…

It is a well known fact that every embedded symplectic surface $\Sigma$ in a symplectic 4-manifold $(X^4,\omega)$ can be made $J$-holomorphic for some almost-complex structure $J$ compatible with $\omega$. In this paper we investigate when…

The deformation problem for pseudoholomorphic curves and related geometrical properties of the total moduli space of pseudoholomorphic curves are studied. A sufficient condition for the saddle point property of the total moduli space is…

We construct an infinite family of homologous, non-isotopic, symplectic surfaces of any genus greater than one in a certain class of closed, simply connected, symplectic four-manifolds. Our construction is the first example of this…

David Gabai recently proved a smooth 4-dimensional "Light Bulb Theorem" in the absence of 2-torsion in the fundamental group. We extend his result to 4-manifolds with arbitrary fundamental group by showing that an invariant of Mike Freedman…

Any two homologous surfaces of the same genus embedded in a smooth 4-manifold X with simply-connected complements are shown to be smoothly isotopic in the connected sum of X and the product of a 2-sphere with itself, if the surfaces are…

The symplectic isotopy conjecture states that every smooth symplectic surface in $CP^2$ is symplectically isotopic to a complex algebraic curve. Progress began with Gromov's pseudoholomorphic curves [Gro85], and progressed further…

Given a closed, smooth 4-manifold $X$ and self-diffeomorphism $f$ that is topologically pseudo-isotopic to the identity, we study the question of whether $f$ is moreover smoothly pseudo-isotopic to the identity. If the fundamental group of…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the following problem: For a fixed 2-dimensional homology class K in a simply connected symplectic 4-manifold, up to smooth isotopy, how many connected smoothly embedded symplectic submanifolds…

For oriented surfaces $\Sigma$ with boundary, we consider the infinite-dimensional deformation space of projective structures on $\Sigma$ with nondegenerate boundary, up to isotopies fixing the boundary. We show that this space carries a…

Let (M,\omega) be a symplectic manifold, and (\Sigma,\sigma) a closed connected symplectic 2-manifold. We construct a weakly symplectic form {\omega^{D}}_{(\Sigma, \sigma)} on the space of immersions \Sigma \to M that is a special case of…

In this article, we construct countably many mutually non-isotopic diffeomorphisms of some closed non simply-connected 4-manifolds that are homotopic to but not isotopic to the identity, by surgery along $\Theta$-graphs. As corollaries of…

Let $\Sigma$ be an orientbale closed surface and let $\Sigma'$ be a nonorientable closed surface. In the paper, we show that for any nontrivial orientable $S^2$ fiber bundles $X= \Sigma \ltimes S^2$ and $X' = \Sigma' \ltimes S^2$, there are…