arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Ronald Fintushel.
By studying the example of smooth structures on CP^2#3(-CP^2) we illustrate how surgery on a single embedded nullhomologous torus can be utilized to change the symplectic structure, the Seiberg-Witten invariant, and hence the smooth structure on a 4-manifold.
We present a method for finding embedded nullhomologous tori in standard 4-manifolds which can be utilized to change their smooth structure. As an application, we show how to obtain infinite families of simply connected smooth 4-manifolds with b^+ = 1 and b^- = 2,...,7, via surgery on nullhomologous tori embedded in the standard manifolds CP^2 # k (-CP^2), k=2,...,7.
We introduce a general procedure called `reverse engineering' that can be used to construct infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds in a given homeomorphism type. As one of the applications of this technique, we produce an infinite family of pairwise nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds homeomorphic to CP^2#3(-CP^2).
We produce infinite families of exotic actions of finite cyclic groups on simply connected smooth 4-manifolds with nontrivial Seiberg-Witten invariants.
Despite spectacular advances in defining invariants for simply connected smooth and symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds and the discovery of effective surgical techniques, we still have been unable to classify simply connected smooth manifolds up to diffeomorphism. In these notes, adapted from six lectures given at the 2006 Park City Mathematics Institute Graduate Summer School on Low Dimensional Topology, we will review what we do and do not know about the existence and uniqueness of smooth and symplectic structures on closed, simply connected 4-manifolds. We will focus on those surgical techniques that have been effective in altering smooth and symplectic structures and the Seiberg-Witten invariants that are used to distinguish them. In the last lecture we will then pose a possible classification scheme and test it on a few examples.
For 5 <= k <= 8 we show that the infinite family of exotic smooth structures on CP^2# k(-CP^2) can be achieved by 1/n - surgeries on a single embedded nullhomologous torus in a manifold R_k which is homeomorphic to CP^2# k(-CP^2).
In this note we fill a gap in the proof of the main theorem (Theorem 1.2) of our paper 'Surfaces in 4-manifolds', Math. Res. Letters 4 (1997), 907-914.
We introduce a new technique that is used to show that the complex projective plane blown up at 6, 7, or 8 points has infinitely many distinct smooth structures. None of these smooth structures admit smoothly embedded spheres with self-intersection -1, i.e. they are minimal. In addition, none these smooth structures admit an underlying symplectic structure. Shortly after the appearance of a preliminary version of this article, Park, Stipsicz, and Szabo used the techniques described herein to show that the complex projective plane blown up at 5 points has infinitely many distinct smooth structures. In the final section of this paper we give a somewhat different construction of such a family of examples.
We study the question of how many embedded symplectic or Lagrangian tori can represent the same homology class in a simply connected symplectic 4-manifold.
We define an simple invariant of an embedded nullhomologous Lagrangian torus and use this invariant to show that many symplectic 4-manifolds have infinitely many pairwise symplectically inequivalent nullhomologous Lagrangian tori. We further show that for a large class of examples that lambda(T) is actually a C-infinity invariant. In addition, this invariant is used to show that many symplectic 4-manifolds have nontrivial homology classes which are represented by infinitely many pairwise inequivalent Lagrangian tori, a result first proved by S Vidussi for the homotopy K3-surface obtained from knot surgery using the trefoil knot in [Lagrangian surfaces in a fixed homology class: existence of knotted Lagrangian tori, J. Diff. Geom. (to appear)].
This article presents the constructions of new infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds with the property that any two manifolds in the same family are homeomorphic and, from their construction, seem to be quite different, but cannot be distinguished by Seiberg-Witten invariants. Whether these manifolds are, or are not, actually diffeomorphic seems to be a very difficult question to answer. The most interesting of these constructions is a surgery that from certain symplectic 4-manifolds will produce nonsymplectic 4-manifolds. This is detected by calculations of Seiberg-Witten invariants. The surgery in question can be performed on any 4-manifold which contains as a codimension 0 submanifold a punctured surface bundle over a punctured surface and a nontrivial loop in the base which has trivial monodromy. A starting point for another class of examples in this paper is a family of examples which show that the Parshin-Arakelov theorem for holomorphic Lefschetz fibrations is false in the symplectic category. Such families are constructed by means of knot surgery on elliptic surfaces. It is shown that for a fixed homeomorphism type X (of a simply connected elliptic surface) and a fixed integer $g \ge 3$, there are infinitely many genus g Lefschetz fibrations on nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds, all homeomorphic to X.
We present constructions of simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds which have (up to sign) one basic class and which fill up the geographical region between the half-Noether and Noether lines.
The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that, at least for nonsimply connected 4-manifolds, the Seiberg-Witten invariant alone does not determine diffeomorphism type within the same homeomorphism type.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the following problem: For a fixed 2-dimensional homology class K in a simply connected symplectic 4-manifold, up to smooth isotopy, how many connected smoothly embedded symplectic submanifolds represent K? We show that when K can be represented by a symplectic torus, there are many instances when K can be representated by infinitely many non-isotopic symplectic tori.
We describe a collection of constructions which illustrate a panoply of ``exotic'' smooth 4-manifolds.
It is the purpose of this paper to construct families of examples of nonsymplectic 4-manifolds which (up to sign) have just one Seiberg-Witten basic class.
In this paper we introduce a technique, called rim surgery, which can change a smooth embedding of an orientable surface of positive genus and nonnegative self-intersection in a smooth 4-manifold while leaving the topological embedding unchanged.
In this paper we investigate the relationship between isotopy classes of knots and links in S^3 and the diffeomorphism types of homeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds. As a corollary of this initial investigation, we begin to uncover the surprisingly rich structure of diffeomorphism types of manifolds homeomorphic to the K3 surface.