arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D. Kotschick.
We construct examples of Lefschetz fibrations with prescribed singular fibers. By taking differences of pairs of such fibrations with the same singular fibers, we obtain new examples of surface bundles over surfaces with non-zero signature. From these we derive new upper bounds for the minimal genus of a surface representing a given element in the second homology of a mapping class group.
Using the existence of certain symplectic submanifolds in symplectic 4-manifolds, we prove an estimate from above for the number of singular fibers with separating vanishing cycles in minimal Lefschetz fibrations over surfaces of positive genus. This estimate is then used to deduce that mapping class groups are not uniformly perfect, and that the map from their second bounded cohomology to ordinary cohomology is not injective.
We prove that manifolds admitting a Riemannian metric for which products of harmonic forms are harmonic satisfy strong topological restrictions, some of which are akin to properties of flat manifolds. Others are more subtle, and are related to symplectic geometry and Seiberg-Witten theory. We also prove that a manifold admits a metric with harmonic forms whose product is not harmonic if and only if it is not a rational homology sphere.
The paper was withdrawn due to a gap in the proof of Lemma 3.
We show that a compact complex surface which fibers smoothly over a curve of genus >1 with fibers of genus >1 fibers holomorphically. We deduce an improvement of a result in [D Kotschick, Math. Research Letters, 5 (1998) 227-234], and a characterisation of fibered surfaces with zero signature.
We show that surface bundles over surfaces with base and fiber of genus at least 2 have non-vanishing simplicial volume.
We prove that there are infinitely many pairs of homeomorphic non-diffeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds, such that in each pair one manifold admits an Einstein metric and the other does not. We also show that there are closed 4-manifolds with two smooth structures which admit Einstein metrics with opposite signs of the scalar curvature.
We show that minimal symplectic 4--manifolds with $b_2^+ >1$ and with residually finite fundamental groups are irreducible. We also give examples of irreducible orientable four--manifolds with indefinite intersection forms which are not almost complex with respect to either orientation.
We give a short proof of the following result: Let $X$ be a complex surface of general type. If the canonical divisor of the minimal model of $X$ has selfintersection $= 1$, then $X$ is not diffeomorphic to a rational surface. Our proof is the natural extension of the argument given in our paper in Inventiones Mathematicae (1989) for the case when $X$ is minimal. This argument also gives information about the non--existence of certain smooth embeddings of $2$--spheres in $X$, if $X$ has geometric genus zero.
We disprove Hitchin's conjecture to the effect that for a generic complex structure on a simply connected spin complex surface the square root of the canonical bundle has no more cohomology then is predicted by the Riemann--Roch theorem. (This paper will appear in Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.)