We show that the simply-connected four-manifolds which admit locally linear, homologically trivial actions by rank two finite abelian groups are homeomorphic to connected sums of CP^2, -CP^2, and S^2 x S^2 (with one exception: pseudofree Z_3 x Z_3 actions on the Chern manifold), and also establish an equivariant decompostion theorem.
This generalizes results from a 1970 paper by Orlik and Raymond, and complements more recent work of Fintushel, Yoshida, and Huck on S^1 actions. In each case, the simply-connected four-manifolds which support such actions are essentially the same.
Let $M$ be a triangulated, oriented, connected compact $3$-manifold with connected non-empty boundary. Such a manifold admits a unique decomposition into $\triangle$-prime $3$-manifolds. In this paper, we show that the adjoint Reidemeister torsion has a multiplicative property on the disk sum decomposition of compact $3$-manifolds without a corrective term.
We prove that any quasitoric manifold $M^{2n}$ admits a $T^n$-invariant almost complex structure if and only if $M$ admits a positive omniorientation. In particular, we show that all obstructions to existence of $T^n$-invariant almost complex structure on $M^{2n}$ arise from cohomology of underlying polytope - and hence are trivial.
The (4k+2)-dimensional Kervaire manifold is a closed, piecewise linear (PL) manifold with Kervaire invariant 1 and the same homology as the product of two (2k+1)-dimensional spheres. We show that a finite group of odd order acts freely on a Kervaire manifold if and only if it acts freely on the corresponding product of spheres. If the Kervaire manifold M is smoothable, then each smooth structure on M admits a free smooth involution. If k + 1 is not a 2-power, then the Kervaire manifold in dimension 4k+2 does not admit any free TOP involutions. Free "exotic" (PL) involutions are constructed on …
In this paper, we find infinite hyperbolic 3-manifolds that admit no weakly symplectically fillable contact structures, using tools in Heegaard Floer theory. We also remark that part of these manifolds do admit tight contact structures.
Motivated by the study in Morse theory and Smale's work in dynamics, the following questions are studied and answered: (1) When does a 3-manifold admit an automorphism having a knotted Smale solenoid as an attractor? (2) When does a 3-manifold admit an automorphism whose non-wandering set consists of Smale solenoids? The result presents some intrinsic symmetries for a class of 3-manifolds.
From the view of Heegaard splitting, it is known that if a closed orientable 3-manifold admits a distance at least three Heegaard splitting, then it is hyperbolic. However, for a closed orientable 3-manifold admitting only distance at most two Heegaard splittings, there are examples shows that it could be reducible, Seifert, toroidal or hyperbolic. According to Thurston's Geometrization conjecture, the most important piece of eight geometries is hyperbolic. Thus to read out a hyperbolic 3-manifold from a distance two Heegaard splittings is critical in studying Heegaard splittings. Inspired by …
In this paper we construct non-simply connected contact manifolds $M$ of dimension $\geq5$ such that $M\times S^1$ does not admit a symplectic structure.
We show that manifolds admitting special generic maps also admit nice generalized multisections. Special generic maps are natural generalized versions of Morse functions with exactly two singular points on closed manifolds, characterizing spheres whose dimensions are not $4$ topologically and the $4$-dimensional unit sphere, and canonical projections of unit spheres. They are shown to restrict the differentiable structures of spheres etc. and topologies of more general manifolds strongly by Saeki, Sakuma etc., followed by Nishioka, Wrazidlo etc. and followed by the author. Some elementary or i…
In this paper we study colored triangulations of compact PL 4-manifolds with empty or connected boundary which induce handle decompositions lacking in 1-handles or in 1- and 3-handles, thus facing also the problem, posed by Kirby, of the existence of {\it special handlebody decompositions} for any simply-connected closed PL 4-manifold. In particular, we detect a class of compact simply-connected PL 4-manifolds with empty or connected boundary, which admit such decompositions and, therefore, can be represented by (undotted) framed links. Moreover, this class includes any compact simply-connecte…
A foliation of a manifold M is called R-covered if its lift to the universal cover of M has space of leaves R. We show that there are many graph manifolds which admit taut foliations, but which do not admit any R-covered foliations. On the other hand, we show that these manifolds all have finite covers admitting R-covered foliations.
Simple crystallizations are edge-coloured graphs representing PL 4-manifolds with the property that the 1-skeleton of the associated triangulation equals the 1-skeleton of a 4-simplex. In the present paper, we prove that any (simply-connected) PL $4$-manifold $M$ admitting a simple crystallization admits a special handlebody decomposition, too; equivalently, $M$ may be represented by a framed link yielding $\mathbb S^3$, with exactly $β_2(M)$ components ($β_2(M)$ being the second Betti number of $M$). As a consequence, the regular genus of $M$ is proved to be the double of $β_2(M)$. Moreover, …
It is known by A. Loi and R. Piergallini that a closed, oriented, smooth 3-manifold is Stein fillable if and only if it has a positive open book decomposition. In the present paper we will show that for every link L in a Stein fillable 3-manifold there exists an additional knot L' to L such that the union of the links L and L' is the binding of a positive open book decomposition of the Stein fillable 3-manifold. To prove the assertion, we will use the divide, which is a generalization of real morsification theory of complex plane curve singularities, and 2-handle attachings along Legendrian cu…
We introduce hyperelliptic simplified (more generally, directed) broken Lefschetz fibrations, which is a generalization of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations. We construct involutions on the total spaces of such fibrations of genus $g\geq 3$ and extend these involutions to the four-manifolds obtained by blowing up the total spaces. The extended involutions induce double branched coverings over blown up sphere bundles over the sphere. We also show that the regular fiber of such a fibration of genus $g\geq 3$ represents a non-trivial rational homology class of the total space.
We give an elementary proof of the fact that any orientable 3-manifold admits a framing (i.e. is parallelizable) and any non-orientable 3-manifold admits a projective framing. The proof uses only basic facts about immersions of surfaces in 3-space.
We give three infinite families of examples of nonhyperbolic Dehn fillings on hyperbolic manifolds. A manifold in the first family admits two Dehn fillings of distance two apart, one of which is toroidal and annular, and the other is reducible and $\partial$-reducible. A manifold in the second family has boundary consisting of two tori, and admits two reducible Dehn fillings. A manifold in the third family admits a toroidal filling and a reducible filling with distance 3 apart. These examples establish the virtual bounds for distances between certain types of nonhyperbolic Dehn fillings.
We construct, for $m\geq 6$ and $2n\leq m$, closed manifolds $M^{m}$ with finite nonzero $φ(M^{m},S^{n}$), where $φ(M,N)$ denotes the minimum number of critical points of a smooth map $M\to N$. We also give some explicit families of examples for even $m\geq 6, n=3$, taking advantage of the Lie group structure on $S^3$. Moreover, there are infinitely many such examples with $φ(M^{m},S^{n})=1$. Eventually we compute the signature of the manifolds $M^{2n}$ occurring for even $n$.
Two Dehn surgeries on a knot are called purely cosmetic if their surgered manifolds are homeomorphic as oriented manifolds. Gordon conjectured that non-trivial knots in $S^3$ do not admit purely cosmetic surgeries. In this article, we confirm this conjecture for cable knots.
Under mild topological restrictions, this article establishes that a smooth, closed, simply connected manifold of dimension at most seven which can be decomposed as the union of two disk bundles must be rationally elliptic. In dimension five, such manifolds are classified up to diffeomorphism, while the same is true in dimension six when either the second Betti number vanishes or the third Betti number is non-trivial.
We show that two-bridge knots and alternating fibered knots admit no purely cosmetic surgeries, i.e., no pair of distinct Dehn surgeries on such a knot produce 3-manifolds that are homeomorphic as oriented manifolds. Our argument, based on a recent result by Hanselman, uses several invariants of knots or 3-manifolds; for knots, we study the signature and some finite type invariants, and for 3-manifolds, we deploy the $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$ Casson invariant.
We construct examples of codimension two hyperbolic link complements in closed smooth 4-manifolds with homeomorphism type $\#_{2k}S^2 \times S^2$. All our examples are based on a construction of J. Ratcliffe and S. Tschantz, who constructed 1171 non-compact finite volume hyperbolic 4-manifolds of minimal volume. We then give necessary conditions for a closed smooth simply connected 4-manifold to contain a codimension two link complement that admits a hyperbolic structure.
We give a necessary and suffcient condition for almost-flat manifolds with cyclic holonomy to admit a Spin structure. Using this condition we find all 4-dimensional orientable almost- flat manifolds with cyclic holonomy that do not admit a Spin structure.
We show that infinitely many of the simply connected 4-manifolds constructed by Levine and Lidman that do not admit PL spines actually admit topological spines.
In this paper, we study the action of $\text{Homeo}_0(M)$, the identity component of the group of homeomorphisms of an $n$-dimensional manifold $M$ with an $\mathbb{F}_p$-free action, on another manifold $N$ of dimension $n+k<2n$. We prove that if $M$ is not an $\mathbb{F}_p$-homology sphere, then $N\cong M\times K$ for a homology manifold $K$ such that the action of $\text{Homeo}_0(M)$ on $M$ is standard and on $K$ is trivial. In particular, for $M=S^n$ a sphere, any nontrivial action is a generalization of the "coning-off" construction.
For each natural number n, we construct an example of a graph manifold supporting at least n different Anosov flows that are not orbit equivalent. Our construction is reminiscent of the Thurston-Handel construction: we cut a geodesic flow on a surface of constant negative curvature into two pieces, modify the flow in each piece by pulling back to finite covers, and glue together compatible pairs of pullback flows along their boundary tori to get many distinct flows on the resulting graph manifold.
We show that recent results of Friedl-Vidussi and Chen imply that a symplectic manifold admits a fixed point free circle action if and only if it admits a symplectic circle action and we give a complete description of the symplectic cone in this case. This then completes the characterisation of symplectic 4-manifolds that admit non-trivial circle actions.
Two Dehn surgeries on a knot are called purely cosmetic if their surgered manifolds are homeomorphic as oriented manifolds. Gordon conjectured that non-trivial knots in $S^3$ do not admit purely cosmetic surgeries. In this article, we confirm this conjecture for connected sums of knots by analysing the JSJ-structures.
We prove that every symplectic 4-manifold admits a trisection that is compatible with the symplectic structure in the sense that the symplectic form induces a Weinstein structure on each of the three sectors of the trisection. Along the way, we show that a (potentially singular) symplectic braided surface in $\mathbb{CP}^2$ can be symplectically isotoped into bridge position.
In this paper, firstly, for some $4n$-dimensional almost complex manifolds $M_{i}, ~1\le i \le α$, we prove that $\left(\sharp_{i=1}^α M_{i}\right) \sharp (α{-}1) \mathbb{C} P^{2n}$ must admits an almost complex structure, where $α$ is a positive integer. Secondly, for a $2n$-dimensional almost complex manifold $M$, we get that $M\sharp \overline{\mathbb{C} P^{n}}$ also admits an almost complex structure. At last, as an application, we obtain that $α\mathbb{C} P^{2n}\sharp β\overline{\mathbb{C} P^{2n}}$ admits an almost complex structure if and only if $α$ is odd.
In this article we study proper symplectic and iso-symplectic embeddings of $4$--manifolds in $6$--manifolds. We show that a closed orientable smooth $4$--manifold admitting a Lefschetz fibration over $\C P^1$ admits a symplectic embedding in the symplectic manifold $(\C P^1 \times \C P^1 \times \C P^1, ω_{pr}),$ where $ω_{pr}$ is the product symplectic form on $\C P^1 \times \C P^1 \times \C P^1.$ We also show that there exists a sub-critical Weinstein $6$--manifold in which all finite type Weinstein $4$--manifolds admit iso-symplectic embeddings.
A pair of surgeries on a knot is called purely cosmetic if the pair of resulting 3-manifolds are homeomorphic as oriented manifolds. Using recent work of Hanselman, we show that (nontrivial) knots which arise as the closure of a 3-stranded braid do not admit any purely cosmetic surgeries.
In this paper we show that the Seiberg--Witten invariant is zero for all smooth 4--manifolds with $b_+{>}1$ which admit circle actions that have at least one fixed point. Furthermore, we show that all symplectic 4--manifolds which admit circle actions with fixed points are rational or ruled, and thus admit a symplectic circle action.
The simple loop conjecture for 3-manifolds states that every 2-sided immersion of a closed surface into a 3-manifold is either injective on fundamental groups or admits a compression. This can be viewed as a generalization of the Loop Theorem to immersed surfaces. We prove the conjecture in the case that the target 3-manifold admits a geometric structure modeled on Sol.
We show that any 4-manifold, after surgery on a curve, admits an achiral Lefschetz fibration. In particular, we show that the connected sum of any simply connected 4-manifold with a 2-sphere bundle over the 2-sphere will admit an achiral Lefschetz fibration. We also show these surgered manifolds admit near-symplectic structures and prove more generally that achiral Lefschetz fibrations with sections have near-symplectic structures. As a corollary to our proof we obtain an alternate proof of Gompf's result on the existence of symplectic structures on Lefschetz pencils.
We show that a graph manifold which is a Z-homology 3-sphere not homeomorphic to either the 3-sphere or the Poincaré homology 3-sphere admits a horizontal foliation. This combines with known results to show that the conditions of not being an L-space, of having a left-orderable fundamental group, and of admitting a co-oriented taut foliation, are equivalent for graph manifold Z-homology 3-spheres.
We consider 3-manifolds admitting the action of an involution such that its space of orbits is homeomorphic to $S^3.$ Such involutions are called hyperelliptic as the manifolds admitting such an action. We consider finite groups acting on 3-manifolds and containing hyperelliptic involutions whose fixed-point set has $r>2$ components. In particular we prove that a simple group containing such an involution is isomorphic to $PSL(2,q)$ for some odd prime power $q$, or to one of four other small simple groups.
We consider Gromov-Thurston examples of negatively curved n-manifolds which do not admit metrics of constant sectional curvature. We show that for each n some of the Gromov-Thurston manifolds admit strictly convex real-projective structures.
We construct noncomplex smooth 4-manifolds which admit genus-2 Lefschetz fibrations over S^2. The fibrations are necessarily hyperelliptic, and the resulting 4-manifolds are not even homotopy equivalent to complex surfaces. Furthermore, these examples show that fiber sums of holomorphic Lefschetz fibrations do not necessarily admit complex structures.
We prove that non-compact finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifolds that satisfy a mild cohomological condition (infinitesimal rigidity) admit a family of properly convex deformations of their complete hyperbolic structure where the ends become generalized cusps of type 1 or type 2. We also discuss methods for controlling which types of cusp occur. Using these methods we produce the first known example of a 1-cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold that admits a convex projective structure with a type 2 cusp. We also use these techniques to produce new 1-cusped manifolds that admit a convex projective structu…
We show that there exist infinitely many pairwise distinct non-closed G_2-manifolds (some of which have holonomy full G_2) such that they admit co-oriented contact structures and have co-oriented contact submanifolds which are also associative. Along the way, we prove that there exists a tubular neighborhood N of every orientable three-submanifold Y of an orientable seven-manifold with spin structure such that for every co-oriented contact structure on Y, N admits a co-oriented contact structure such that Y is a contact submanifold of N. Moreover, we construct infinitely many pairwise distinct…
Let $M$ be a simply-connected closed manifold of dimension $\geq 5$ which does not admit a metric with positive scalar curvature. We give necessary conditions for $M$ to admit a scalar-flat metric. These conditions involve the first Pontrjagin class and the cohomology ring of $M$. As a consequence any simply-connected scalar-flat manifold of dimension $\geq 5$ with vanishing first Pontrjagin class admits a metric with positive scalar curvature. We also describe some relations between scalar-flat metrics, almost complex structures and the free loop space.
We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact 3-manifold, or contact 3-manifolds with non-vanishing Heegaard Floer invariant, is the boundary of a simply connected 4-manifolds that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures each of which supports a symplectic structure with concave boundary, that is there are infinitely many exotic caps for any such contact manifold.
In this paper we use the G-spin theorem to show that the Davis hyperbolic 4-manifold admits harmonic spinors. This is the first example of a closed hyperbolic 4-manifold that admits harmonic spinors. We also explicitly describe the Spinor bundle of a spin hyperbolic 2- or 4-manifold and show how to calculated the subtle sign terms in the G-spin theorem for an isometry, with isolated fixed points, of a closed spin hyperbolic 2- or 4-manifold.
In 1967, Chillingworth proved that all convex simplicial 3-balls are collapsible. Using the classical notion of tightness, we generalize this to arbitrary manifolds: We show that all tight simplicial 3-manifolds admit some perfect discrete Morse function. We also strengthen Chillingworth's theorem by proving that all convex simplicial 3-balls are non-evasive. In contrast, we show that many non-evasive 3-balls are not convex.
Y. Benoist proved that if a closed three-manifold M admits an indecomposable convex real projective structure, then M is topologically the union along tori and Klein bottles of finitely many sub-manifolds each of which admits a complete finite volume hyperbolic structure on its interior. We describe some initial results in the direction of a potential converse to Benoist's theorem. We show that a cusped hyperbolic three-manifold may, under certain assumptions, be deformed to convex projective structures with totally geodesic torus boundary. Such structures may be convexly glued together whenev…
We prove that many simply connected symplectic four-manifolds dissolve after connected sum with only one copy of $S^{2}\times S^{2}$. For any finite group G that acts freely on the three-sphere we construct closed smooth four-manifolds with fundamental group G which do not admit metrics of positive scalar curvature, but whose universal covers do admit such metrics.
The purpose of this paper is to produce restrictions on fundamental groups of manifolds admitting good complexifications by proving the following Cheeger-Gromoll type splitting theorem: Any closed manifold $M$ admitting a good complexification has a finite-sheeted regular covering $M_1$ such that $M_1$ admits a fiber bundle structure with base $(S^1)^k$ and fiber $N$ that admits a good complexification and also has zero virtual first Betti number. We give several applications to manifolds of dimension at most 5.
