Related papers: Selfdual 4-Manifolds, Projective Surfaces, and the…
The purpose of this article is to review some recent results on the geometry of neutral signature metrics in dimension four and their twistor spaces. The following topics are considered: Neutral K\"ahler and hyperk\"ahler surfaces, Walker…
This paper investigates the question of which smooth compact 4-manifolds admit Riemannian metrics that minimize the L2-norm of the curvature tensor. Metrics with this property are called OPTIMAL; Einstein metrics and scalar-flat…
Two 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic if they become diffeomorphic after connected sum with S^2 x S^2's. This paper shows that two closed, orientable, homotopy equivalent, smooth 4-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic, provided a certain…
We study 4D N=2 superconformal theories that arise from the compactification of 6D N=(2,0) theories of type A_{2N-1} on a Riemann surface C, in the presence of punctures twisted by a Z_2 outer automorphism. We describe how to do a complete…
In this paper we announce a gluing theorem for conformal structures with anti-self-dual (ASD) Weyl tensor that applies in geometrical situations that are more general than those considered by previous authors. By adapting a method proposed…
4-dimensional spaces equipped with 2-dimensional (complex holomorphic or real smooth) completely integrable distributions are considered. The integral manifolds of such distributions are totally null and totally geodesics 2-dimensional…
For each nonnegative integer m we show that any closed, oriented topological four-manifold with fundamental group Z_{4m+2} and odd intersection form, with possibly seven exceptions, either admits no smooth structure or admits infinitely…
Quaternion-Kaehler four-manifolds, or equivalently anti-self-dual Einstein manifolds, are locally determined by one scalar function subject to Przanowski's equation. Using twistorial methods we construct a Lax Pair for Przanowski's…
A compact 4-dimensional manifold is a non-singular graph-manifold if it can be obtained by the glueing T^2-bundles over compact surfaces (with boundary) of negative Euler characteristics. If none of glueing diffeomorphisms respect the…
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 study certain compact 4-manifolds with non-negative sectional curvature $K$. If $s$ is the scalar curvature and $W_+$ is the self-dual part of Weyl tensor, then it will be shown that there is no metric $g$ on $S^2 \times…
New estimates are derived concerning the behavior of self-dual hamonic 2-forms on a compact Riemannian 4-manifold with non-trivial Seiberg-Witten invariants. Applications include a vanishing theorem for certain Seiberg-Witten invariants on…
We prove that semisimple 4-dimensional oriented topological field theories lead to stable diffeomorphism invariants and can therefore not distinguish homeomorphic closed oriented smooth 4-manifolds and homotopy equivalent simply connected…
The correlation functions of supersymmetric gauge theories on a four-manifold X can sometimes be expressed in terms of topological invariants of X. We show how the existence of superconformal fixed points in the gauge theory can provide…
We exhibit two three-parameter families of locally conformal symplectic forms on the solvmanifold $M_{n,k}$ considered in [1], and show, using the Hodge-de Rham theory for the Lichnerowicz cohomology that that they are not $d_{\omega}$…
We develop the Dirac-Schwinger-Zwanziger (DSZ) quantization of classical abelian gauge theories with general duality structure on oriented Lorentzian four-manifolds $(M,g)$ of arbitrary topology, obtaining, as a result, the…
For a special family of 4d $\mathcal{N}=2$ superconformal quiver theories, the worldsheet dual corresponding to the free theory is identified. This result is obtained from the recently proposed worldsheet dual of free $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM by…
We discuss the twistor correspondence between path geometries in three dimensions with vanishing Wilczynski invariants and anti-self-dual conformal structures of signature $(2, 2)$. We show how to reconstruct a system of ODEs with vanishing…
We study compactifications on Riemann surfaces with punctures of N=(1,0) 6d SCFTs with a one dimensional tensor branch and no continuous global symmetries. The effective description of such models on the tensor branch is in terms of pure…
We show that 4--dimensional conformal field theory is most naturally formulated on Kulkarni 4--folds, i. e. real 4--folds endowed with an integrable quaternionic structure. This leads to a formalism that parallels very closely that of…