Related papers: Four-manifolds of large negative deficiency

Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with…

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…

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 show that if $\pi$ is the fundamental group of a 4-dimensional infrasolvmanifold then $-2\leq{def(\pi)}\leq0$, and give examples realizing each of these values. We also determine the abstract commensurators of such groups. Finally we…

These notes, which are based on three lectures delivered at the summer school "Topological 4-manifolds" at CRM in 2025, discuss classifications of locally flat spheres in closed, simply-connected $4$-manifolds, with a focus on the case…

The signature of a surface bundle over a surface is known to be divisible by 4. It is also known that the signature vanishes if the fiber genus is less than or equal to 2 or the base genus is less than or equal to 1. In this article, we…

The fundamental group of a Riemannian manifold with $\delta$-pinched negative curvature, $\delta >1/4$, cannot be the fundamental group of a quasicompact K\"ahler manifold. The proof also implies that a non-uniform lattice in $F_{4(-20)}$…

It is an important question whether it is possible to put a geometry on a given manifold or not. It is well known that any simply connected closed manifold admitting a real projective structure must be a sphere. Therefore, any simply…

The deficiency of a group is the maximum over all presentations for that group of the number of generators minus the number of relators. Every finite group has non-positive deficiency. We show that every non-positive integer is the…

For several instances of metric largeness like enlargeability or having hyperspherical universal covers, we construct non-large vector subspaces in the rational homology of finitely generated groups. The functorial properties of this…

We determine those smooth $n$--dimensional closed manifolds with $n \geq 4$ which admit round fold maps into ${\mathbb{R}}^{n-1}$, i.e.\ fold maps whose critical value sets consist of disjoint spheres of dimension $n-2$ isotopic to…

Let $G$ be a compact Lie group acting isometrically on a compact Riemannian manifold $M$ with nonempty fixed point set $M^G$. We say that $M$ is fixed-point homogeneous if $G$ acts transitively on a normal sphere to some component of $M^G$.…

For any given finitely presented group G there exists a closed oriented 4-manifold with fundamental group G. What pairs of integers can occur as the signature and Euler characteristic of such a 4-manifold? The first part of this paper…

In this paper we construct families of homology spheres which bound 4-manifolds with intersection forms isomorphic to $-E_8$. We show that these families have arbitrary large correction terms. This result says that among homology spheres,…

We classify topological $4$-manifolds with boundary and fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}$, under some assumptions on the boundary. We apply this to classify surfaces in simply-connected $4$-manifolds with $S^3$ boundary, where the fundamental…

We prove that many simply connected symplectic four-manifolds dissolve after connected sum with only one copy of $S^{2}\times S^{2}$. For any finite group G that acts freely on the three-sphere we construct closed smooth four-manifolds with…

An invariant of orientable 3-manifolds is defined by taking the minimum $n$ such that a given 3-manifold embeds in the connected sum of $n$ copies of $S^2 \times S^2$, and we call this $n$ the embedding number of the 3-manifold. We give…

For each integer n\ge 2, we construct an irreducible, smooth, complex projective variety M of dimension n, whose fundamental group has infinitely generated homology in degree n+1 and whose universal cover is a Stein manifold, homotopy…

We construct Morse homology groups associated with any regular function on a smooth complex algebraic variety, allowing singular and non-compact critical loci. These groups are generated by critical points of a certain large pertubation of…

A shadowed polyhedron is a simple polyhedron equipped with half integers on regions, called gleams, which represents a compact, oriented, smooth 4-manifold. The polyhedron is embedded in the 4-manifold and it is called a shadow of that…