Related papers: Exotic smooth structures on 3{CP}^2#8{-CP}^2
This work gives a manual for constructing superconformal field theories associated to a family of smooth K3 surfaces. A direct method is not known, but a combination of orbifold techniques with a non-classical duality turns out to yield…
This paper provides a topological method to construct all simply-connected, spin, smooth $6$-manifolds with torsion-free homology using simply-connected, smooth $4$-manifolds as building blocks. We explicitly determine the invariants that…
We prove a diagonalisation theorem for the tautological, or generalised Miller-Morita-Mumford classes of compact, smooth, simply-connected definite $4$-manifolds. Our result can be thought of as a families version of Donaldson's…
In this paper we exhibit infinite families of embedded tori in 4-manifolds that are topologically isotopic but smoothly distinct. The interesting thing about these tori is that they are topologically trivial in the sense that each bounds a…
In [HT], two of us constructed a closed oriented 4-dimensional manifold with fundamental group $\Z$ that does not split off $S^1\times S^3$. In this note we show that this 4-manifold, and various others derived from it, do not admit smooth…
We investigate how exotic differential structures may reveal themselves in particle physics. The analysis is based on the A. Connes' construction of the standard model. It is shown that, if one of the copies of the spacetime manifold is…
Let $\pi$ be a group satisfying the Farrell-Jones conjecture and assume that $B\pi$ is a 4-dimensional Poincar\'e duality space. We consider topological, closed, connected manifolds with fundamental group $\pi$ whose canonical map to $B\pi$…
It is known that every exotic smooth structure on a simply connected closed 4-manifold is determined by a codimention zero compact contractible Stein submanifold and an involution on its boundary. Such a pair is called a cork. In this…
We classify the possible elementary amenable fundamental groups of compact aspherical 4-manifolds with boundary and conclude that they are either polycyclic or solvable Baumslag- Solitar. Since these groups are good and satisfy the…
We show that infinitely many of the simply connected 4-manifolds constructed by Levine and Lidman that do not admit PL spines actually admit topological spines.
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…
A family of exotic fusion systems generalizing the group fusion systems on Sylow $p$-subgroups of $\mathrm{G}_2(p^a)$ and $\mathrm{Sp}_4(p^a)$ is constructed.
We prove that a positive definite smooth four-manifold with $b_2^+ \geq 2$ and having either no 1-handles or no 3-handles cannot admit a symplectic structure.
We prove that a variety of examples of minimal complex surfaces admit exotic diffeomorphisms, providing the first known instances of exotic diffeomorphisms of irreducible 4-manifolds. We also give sufficient conditions for the boundary Dehn…
We extend the theory of relative trisections of smooth, compact, oriented $4$-manifolds with connected boundary given by Gay and Kirby to include $4$-manifolds with an arbitrary number of boundary components. Additionally, we provide…
Despite spectacular advances in defining invariants for simply connected smooth and symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds and the discovery of effective surgical techniques, we still have been unable to classify simply connected smooth…
One approach to produce a pair of homeomorphic-but-not-diffeomophic closed 4-manifolds is to find a knot which is smoothly slice in one but not the other. This approach has never been run successfully. We give the first examples of a pair…
We show that the manifold *CP^2 # *RP^4, which is homotopy equivalent but not homeomorphic to CP^2 # RP^4, is in fact smoothable.
We use a variation of a classical construction of A. Hatcher to construct virtually all stable exotic smooth structures on compact smooth manifold bundles whose fibers have sufficiently large odd dimension (at least twice the base dimension…
Symplectic 4-manifolds $(X,\omega)$ with $b_+{=}1$ are roughly classified by the canonical class $K$ and the symplectic form $\omega$ depending upon the sign of $K^2$ and $K\cdot \omega$. Examples are known for each category except for the…