Related papers: Branched shadows and complex structures of 4-manif…

We give a self-contained introduction to the theory of Turaev's shadows as a tool to study 3 and 4-manifolds. The goal of the present paper twofold: on one side it is intended to be a shortcut to a basic use of the theory of shadows, on the…

We study the set of all closed oriented smooth 4-manifolds experimentally, according to a suitable complexity defined using Turaev's shadows. This complexity roughly measures how complicated the 2-skeleton of the 4-manifold is. We…

The shadow-complexity is an invariant of closed $4$-manifolds defined by using $2$-dimensional polyhedra called Turaev's shadows, which, roughly speaking, measures how complicated a $2$-skeleton of the $4$-manifold is. In this paper, we…

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…

We prove that a closed 4-manifold has shadow-complexity zero if and only if it is a kind of 4-dimensional graph manifold, which decomposes into some particular blocks along embedded copies of S^2 x S^1, plus some complex projective spaces.…

The topology of symplectic 4-manifolds is related to that of singular plane curves via the concept of branched covers. Thus, various classification problems concerning symplectic 4-manifolds can be reformulated as questions about singular…

We establish a braid of interlocking exact sequences containing the group of homotopy self-equivalences of a smooth or topological 4-manifold. The braid is computed for manifolds whose fundamental group is finite of odd order.

We provide new branched covering representations for bounded and/or non-compact 4-manifolds, which extend the known ones for closed 4-manifolds. Assuming $M$ to be a connected oriented PL 4-manifold, our main results are the following: (1)…

We provide sufficient conditions assuring that a suitably decorated 2-polyhedron can be thickened to a compact 4-dimensional Stein domain. We also study a class of flat polyhedra in 4-manifolds and find conditions assuring that they admit…

We characterize the groups of branched twist spins of classical knots in terms of 3-manifold groups, and also give a purely algebraic, conjectural characterization in terms of $PD_3$-groups. We show also that each group is the group of at…

In terms of Turaev's shadows, we provide a sufficient condition for a compact, smooth, acyclic 4-manifold with boundary the 3-sphere to be diffeomorphic to the standard 4-ball. As a consequence, we prove that if a compact, smooth, acyclic…

We prove necessary and sufficient conditions for a smooth surface in a 4-manifold X to be pseudoholomorphic with respect to some almost complex structure on X. This provides a systematic approach to the construction of pseudoholomorphic…

We analyze the symplectic and complex structures on the panelled web 4-manifolds. In particular, we give infinite family of examples of almost complex but not symplectic and not complex 4-manifolds in the non-simply connected case.

It is known since 1954 that every 3-manifold bounds a 4-manifold. Thus, for instance, every 3-manifold has a surgery diagram. There are several proofs of this fact, including constructive proofs, but there has been little attention to the…

Families of smooth closed oriented 4-manifolds with a complex spin structure are studied by means of a family version of the Bauer--Furuta invariants in the context of parametrised stable homotopy theory, leading to a definition of…

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…

We prove that every smoothly embedded surface in a 4--manifold can be isotoped to be in bridge position with respect to a given trisection of the ambient 4--manifold; that is, after isotopy, the surface meets components of the trisection in…

Turaev's shadow can be seen locally as the Stein factorization of a stable map. In this paper, we define the notion of stable map complexity for a compact orientable 3-manifold bounded by (possibly empty) tori counting, with some weights,…

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…

We prove an equivalence of categories from formal complex structures with formal holomorphic maps to homotopy algebras over a simple operad with its associated homotopy morphisms. We extend this equivalence to complex manifolds. A complex…