An irreducible real projective plane in the 4-sphere

Abstract

We construct an irreducible embedded projective plane in $S^4$. This gives a counterexample to the Kinoshita conjecture and answers Problem 4.37 of the K3 problem list. Moreover, we answer both Questions (i) and (ii) of Problem 4.37: (i) the connected sum $R\# R$ is a Klein bottle in $S^4$ with extremal normal Euler number that does not admit an unknotted projective plane summand, and (ii) we show that our projective plane $R$ is irreducible by showing that the peripheral map $\pi_1 (\partial (S^4\setminus\mathring{N}(R)))\to \pi_1 (S^4 \setminus \mathring{N}(R))$ has kernel of order $2$.