Horizontal decompositions, II

Abstract

We complete the classification of the smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifolds having Euler characteristic less than four and a horizontal handlebody decomposition of genus one. We use the classification result to find a large family of rational homology ball smoothings of cyclic quotient singularities which can be smoothly embedded into the complex projective plane. Our family contains all such rational balls previously known to embed into $\mathbb{CP}^2$ and infinitely many more. We also show that a rational ball of our family admits an almost-complex embedding in $\mathbb{CP}^2$ if and only if it admits a symplectic embedding.