Related papers: Some recent approaches in 4-dimensional surgery th…

We study the process of compactification as a topology change. It is shown how the mediating spacetime topology, or cobordism, may be simplified through surgery. Within the causal Lorentzian approach to quantum gravity, it is shown that any…

We complete the description of surgery obstructions up to homotopy equivalence for closed oriented manifolds with finite fundamental group. New examples are presented of non-trivial obstructions for Arf invariant product formulas in…

The trace of $n$-framed surgery on a knot in $S^3$ is a 4-manifold homotopy equivalent to the 2-sphere. We characterise when a generator of the second homotopy group of such a manifold can be realised by a locally flat embedded 2-sphere…

Surgery obstruction of a normal map to a simple Poincare pair $(X,Y)$ lies in the relative surgery obstruction group $L_*(\pi_1(Y)\to\pi_1(X))$. A well known result of Wall, the so called $\pi$-$\pi$ theorem, states that in higher…

Given a metric defined on a manifold of dimension three, we study the problem of finding a conformal filling by a Poincar\'e-Einstein metric on a manifold of dimension four. We establish a compactness result for classes of conformally…

Kreck's modified surgery gives an approach to classifying smooth $2n$-manifolds up to stable diffeomorphism, i.e. up to connected sum with copies of $S^n \times S^n$. In dimension 4, we use a combination of modified and classical surgery to…

We study the constraints imposed by superconformal symmetry, crossing symmetry, and unitarity for theories with four supercharges in spacetime dimension $2\leq d\leq 4$. We show how superconformal algebras with four Poincar\'{e}…

For a 3-manifold with torus boundary admitting an appropriate involution, we show that Khovanov homology provides obstructions to certain exceptional Dehn fillings. For example, given a strongly invertible knot in S^3, we give obstructions…

We undertake a systematic investigation of compact aspherical manifolds with boundary; motivated by the plethora of examples in the bounded case and by the beauty of the theory in the closed case. Our main theorems give a homological…

Techniques of gauge theory are used to define and compute an invariant of certain diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds. The invariant vanishes for any diffeomorphism which is smoothly isotopic to the identity. As an application, we give the first…

The aim of this paper is to give an $s$-cobordism classification of topological $4$-manifolds in terms of the standard invariants using the group of homotopy self-equivalences. Hambleton and Kreck constructed a braid to study the group of…

While topologists have had possession of possible counterexamples to the smooth 4-dimensional Poincar\'{e} conjecture (SPC4) for over 30 years, until recently no invariant has existed which could potentially distinguish these examples from…

We compute explicit transgression forms for the Euler and Pontrjagin classes of a Riemannian manifold $M$ of dimension 4 under a conformal change of the metric, or a change to a Riemannian connection with torsion. These formulae describe…

We show that if $N$ is a closed manifold of dimension $n=4$ (resp. $n=5$) with $\pi_2(N) = 0$ (resp. $\pi_2(N)=\pi_3(N)=0$) that admits a metric of positive scalar curvature, then a finite cover $\hat N$ of $N$ is homotopy equivalent to…

For a compact connected manifold M of dimension n greater than 3 and with no metric of positive scalar curvature, we prove that the Yamabe invariant is unchanged under surgery on spheres of dimension different from 1, n-2 and n-1. We use…

We show that for an oriented 4-dimensional Poincar\'e complex with finite fundamental group, whose 2-Sylow subgroup is abelian with at most 2 generators, the homotopy type is determined by its quadratic 2-type.

Given an acyclic map $X\to Y$ of closed manifolds dimension $d$, we study the relationship between the embeddings of $Y$ in $S^{n}$ with those of $X$ in $S^{n}$ when $n-d \ge 3$. The approach taken here is to first solve the Poincar\'e…

We study geodesics on hypersurfaces close to the standard (n-1)-dimensional sphere in n-dimensional Euclidean space. Following Poincar\'e, we treat the problem within the framework of the analytical mechanics, and employ the perturbation…

We answer a weaker version of the classification problem for the homotopy types of $(n-2)$-connected closed orientable $(2n-1)$-manifolds. Let $n\geq 6$ be an even integer, and $X$ be a $(n-2)$-connected finite orientable Poincar\'e…

We use surgery along 2-tori embedded in a union of two copies of a product of punctured 2-tori to produce a new collection of homotopy 4-spheres (4-manifolds homotopy equivalent to $S^4$ and hence homeomorphic to $S^4$ but possibly not…