Related papers: Aspherical 4-manifolds with positive Euler charact…

We prove that there exists no a priori bound on the Euler characteristic of a closed symplectic 4-manifold coming solely from the genus of a compatible Lefschetz pencil on it, nor is there a similar bound for Stein fillings of a contact…

We give an explicit local classification of conformally equivalent but oppositely oriented Kaehler metrics on a 4-manifold which are toric with respect to a common 2-torus action. In the generic case, these structures have an intriguing…

We show that the minimal volume entropy of closed manifolds remains unaffected when nonessential manifolds are added in a connected sum. We combine this result with the stable cohomotopy invariant of Bauer-Furuta in order to present an…

We show that every closed symplectic four-dimensional manifold admits compatible almost Kaehler metrics of negative scalar curvature.

A well-known question by Gromov asks whether the vanishing of the simplicial volume of oriented closed connected aspherical manifolds implies the vanishing of the Euler characteristic. We study various versions of Gromov's question and…

In \cite{AP3, AHP}, the first author and his collaborators constructed the irreducible symplectic $4$-manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to $(2n-1){\mathbb{CP}}^{2}\#(2n-1)\overline{\mathbb{CP}}^{2}$ for each integer $n…

We say that a topologically embedded 3-sphere in a smoothing of Euclidean 4-space is a barrier provided, roughly, no diffeomorphism of the 4-manifold moves the 3-sphere off itself. In this paper we construct infinitely many one parameter…

Any oriented $4$-dimensional Einstein metric with semi-definite sectional curvature satisfies the pointwise inequality \[ \frac{|s|}{\sqrt{6}}\geq|W^+|+|W^-|, \] where $s$, $W^+$ and $W^-$ are respectively the scalar curvature, the…

We obtain topological obstructions to the existence of a complete Riemannian metric with uniformly positive scalar curvature on certain (non-compact) $4$-manifolds. In particular, such a metric on the interior of a compact contractible…

Let \(M\) be a closed connected oriented topological \(4\)-manifold. We prove that if \(F_1,\dots,F_r\subset M\) are pairwise disjoint connected locally flat topologically embedded nonorientable surfaces with nonorientable genera \(g_i\),…

We introduce a new generalization of Gompf nuclei and give applications. We construct infinitely many exotic smooth structures for a large class of compact 4-manifolds with boundary, regarding topological invariants. We prove that a large…

In this paper we describe the topology of 4-dimensional closed orientable Riemannian manifolds with a uniform lower bound of sectional curvature and with a uniform upper bound of diameter which collapse to metric spaces of lower dimensions.…

We construct closed, aspherical, smooth 4-manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. These provide counterexamples to a smooth analog of the Borel conjecture in dimension four. Our technique is to apply the `reflection group…

The twistor space of a Riemannian 4-manifold carries two almost complex structures, $J_+$ and $J_-$, and a natural closed 2-form $\omega$. This article studies limits of manifolds for which $\omega$ tames either $J_+$ or $J_-$. This amounts…

It is well-known that odd-dimensional manifolds have Euler characteristic zero. Furthemore orientable manifolds have an even Euler characteristic unless the dimension is a multiple of $4$. We prove here a generalisation of these statements:…

In the article we introduce new conformal and smooth invariants on compact, oriented four-manifolds with boundary. In the first part, we show that "positivity" conditions on these invariants will impose topological restrictions on…

We show that a closed simply connected 8-manifold (9-manifold) of positive sectional curvature on which a 3-torus (4-torus) acts isometrically is homeomorphic to a sphere, a complex projective space or a quaternionic projective plane…

In the 1930s, H. Hopf conjectured that a closed, even-dimensional manifold of positive sectional curvature has positive Euler characteristic. We show this under the additional assumption of an isometric $T^4$-action on the manifold,…

Using deep analytic methods, Cheeger and Gromov showed that for any smooth (4k-1)-manifold there is a universal bound for the von Neumann $L^2$ $\rho$-invariants associated to arbitrary regular covers. We present a proof of the existence of…

This is a slightly altered version of the authors thesis from 2014. In the first main part we show that the quotient space of a compact, simply connected and nonnegatively curved Riemannian 4-manifold by an effective, isometric…