Related papers: Six Lectures on Four 4-Manifolds
By classical results of Rochlin, Thom, Wallace and Lickorish, it is well-known that any two 3-manifolds (with diffeomorphic boundaries) are related one to the other by surgery operations. Yet, by restricting the type of the surgeries, one…
We define a diffeomorphism invariant of smooth 4-manifolds which we can estimate for many smoothings of R^4 and other smooth 4-manifolds. Using this invariant we can show that uncountably many smoothings of R^4 support no Stein structure.…
Suppose that $C=(C_1,..., C_m)$ is a configuration of 2-dimensional symplectic submanifolds in a symplectic 4-manifold $(X,\omega)$ with connected, negative definite intersection graph $\Gamma_C$. We show that by replacing an appropriate…
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 construct infinite rank summands isomorphic to $\mathbb{Z}^\infty$ in the higher homotopy and homology groups of the diffeomorphism groups of certain $4$-manifolds. These spherical families become trivial in the homotopy and homology…
Log-symplectic structures are Poisson structures that are determined by a symplectic form with logarithmic singularities. We construct moduli spaces of curves with values in a log-symplectic manifold. Among the applications, we classify…
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…
A compact oriented 4-manifold is defined to be of ``superconformal simple type'' if certain polynomials in the basic classes (constructed using the Seiberg-Witten invariants) vanish identically. We show that all known 4-manifolds of…
Contact manifolds are odd-dimensional smooth manifolds endowed with a maximally non-integrable field of hyperplanes. They are intimately related to symplectic manifolds, i.e. even-dimensional smooth manifolds endowed with a closed…
We define relative Ruan invariants that count embedded connected symplectic submanifolds which contact a fixed stable symplectic hypersurface V in a symplectic 4-manifold (X,w) at prescribed points with prescribed contact orders (in…
On a complex manifold $(M,J)$, we interpret complex symplectic and pseudo-K\"ahler structures as symplectic forms with respect to which $J$ is, respectively, symmetric and skew-symmetric. We classify complex symplectic structures on…
In this paper we describe a method to establish when a symplectic manifold $M$ with semi-free Hamiltonian $S^{1}$-action is unique up to isomorphism (equivariant symplectomorphism). This will rely on a study of the symplectic topology of…
We show that there exist smooth, simply connected, four-dimensional spin manifolds which do not admit Einstein metrics, but nonetheless satisfy the strict Hitchin-Thorpe inequality. Our construction makes use of the Bauer/Furuta cohomotopy…
A surgery of a real symplectic manifold $X_{\mathbb R}$ along a real Lagrangian sphere $S$ is a modification of the symplectic and real structure on $X_{\mathbb R}$ in a neigborhood of $S$. Genus 0 Welschinger invariants of two real…
Cosymplectic and normal almost contact structures are analogues of symplectic and complex structures that can be defined on 3-manifolds. Their existence imposes strong topological constraints. Generalized geometry offers a natural common…
Kreck and Schafer produced the first examples of stably diffeomorphic closed smooth 4-manifolds which are not homotopy equivalent. They were constructed by applying the doubling construction to 2-complexes over certain finite abelian groups…
A simplified, user-friendly repackaging of the curvature estimates implied by the Seiberg-Witten equations is formulated in terms of the convex hull of the set of monopole classes. New results are also obtained concerning boundary cases of…
Shapes of four dimensional spaces can be studied effectively via maps to standard surfaces. We explain, and illustrate by quintessential examples, how to simplify such generic maps on 4-manifolds topologically, in order to derive simple…
We show that any closed oriented 3-manifold can be topologically embedded in some simply-connected closed symplectic 4-manifold, and that it can be made a smooth embedding after one stabilization. As a corollary of the proof we show that…
We study left invariant contact forms and left invariant symplectic forms on Lie groups. We give the classification of all symplectic structures on nilpotent Lie algebras up the dimension 6.