Related papers: The E_8-manifold, singular fibers and handlebody d…

We describe off-shell $\mathcal{N}=1$ M-theory compactifications down to four dimensions in terms of eight-dimensional manifolds equipped with a topological $Spin(7)$-structure. Motivated by the exceptionally generalized geometry…

This paper continues the study of decompositions of a smooth 4-manifold into two handlebodies with handles of index $\leq2$. Part I gave existence results in terms of spines and chain complexes over the fundamental group of the ambient…

A theorem on the existence of the unique minimal topologic handle decomposition of differentiable simply connected five-dimensional manifolds is proved. For a decomposition of this sort, the number of handles of each index is given.

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…

Consider a fibered power of an elliptic surface. We characterize its subvarieties that contain a Zariski dense set of points that are torsion points in fibers with complex multiplication. This result can be viewed as a mix of the…

We use a new geometric construction, grope splitting, to give a sharp bound for separation of surfaces in 4-manifolds. We also describe applications of this technique in link-homotopy theory, and to the problem of locating pi_1-null…

We prove that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X admits a broken Lefschetz fibration (aka singular Lefschetz fibration) over the 2-sphere. Given any closed orientable surface F of square zero in X, we can choose the fibration so that…

Branched covering have a long history from ramification of Riemann surfaces to realization of 3-manifolds as covering ramified over a knots; from geometrical topology to algebraic geometry. The present work investigates a notion of branched…

Given a real analytic function $f$ from $\mathbb{R}^4$ to $\mathbb{R}^2$ with isolated critical point at the origin, the link $L_f$ of the singularity is a real fibred knot in $\mathbb{S}^{3}$. From this singularities, we construct a family…

We show that every smooth, closed, orientable 4-manifold X admits a special kind of handlebody decomposition that we call horizontal. We classify the closed 4-manifolds with the simplest horizontal decompositions and we describe all such…

We consider simply-connected $4$-manifolds admitting Lefschetz fibrations over the $2$-sphere. We explicitly construct nonhyperelliptic and hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations of genus $4$ on simply-connected $4$-manifolds which are exotic…

In this article we show that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold can be decomposed into two codimension zero submanifolds (one with reversed orientation) so that both pieces are exact Kahler manifolds with strictly pseudoconvex…

This paper explains an application of Gromov's h-principle to prove the existence, on any orientable 4-manifold, of a folded symplectic form. That is a closed 2-form which is symplectic except on a separating hypersurface where the form…

We consider a rational surface with a relatively minimal fibration. Picard number of a such fibred surface is bounded in terms of the genus of a general fibre. When Picard number is the maximum for any given genus, we characterize a such…

Let (P1) be certain elliptic free-boundary problem on a Riemannian manifold (M,g). In this paper we study the restrictions on the topology and geometry of the fibres (the level sets) of the solutions f to (P1). We give a technique based on…

This is a paper in smooth $4$-manifold topology, inspired by the N\'{e}ron-Lang Theorem in number theory. More precisely, we prove that a smooth version $\MW(\pi)$ of Mordell-Weil group of an elliptic fibration $\pi:M\to\Pb^1$ is finitely…

On compact Riemannian manifolds, we prove a decomposition theorem for arbitrarily bounded energy sequence of solutions of a singular elliptic equation.

In this article we use the combinatorial and geometric structure of manifolds with embedded cylinders in order to develop an adiabatic decomposition of the Hodge cohomology of these manifolds. We will on the one hand describe the adiabatic…

The purpose of this note is to explain a combinatorial description of closed smooth oriented 4-manifolds in terms of positive Dehn twist factorizations of surface mapping classes, and further explore these connections. This is obtained via…

We introduce multisections of smooth, closed 4-manifolds, which generalize trisections to decompositions with more than three pieces. This decomposition describes an arbitrary smooth, closed 4-manifold as a sequence of cut systems on a…