These notes are adapted from two talks given at the 2004 Clay Institute Summer School on Floer homology, gauge theory, and low dimensional topology at the Alfred Renyi Institute. We will quickly 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 then list the techniques used to date and capture the key features common to all these techniques. We finish with some approachable questions that further explore the relationship between these techniques and whose answers may assist in future advances towards a classification scheme.
Let M be a closed simply connected 2n-dimensional manifold. The present paper is concerned with the cohomology of classifying spaces of connected groups of homeomorphisms of M.
Diffeomorphism types of simply connected $3$-dimensional Mori fibre spaces
School of Mathematics, Shandong University（山东大学数学学院）；Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院；中国科学院大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（广西民族大学数学科学学院）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Guangxi Minzu University
We show that every positive definite closed 4-manifold with $b_2^+>1$ and without 1-handles has a vanishing stable cohomotopy Seiberg-Witten invariant, and thus admits no symplectic structure. We also show that every closed oriented 4-manifold with $b_2^+\not\equiv 1$ and $b_2^-\not\equiv 1\pmod{4}$ and without 1-handles admits no symplectic structure for at least one orientation of the manifold. In fact, relaxing the 1-handle condition, we prove these results under more general conditions which are much easier to verify.
This paper provides a topological method to construct all simply-connected, spin, smooth $6$-manifolds with torsion-free homology using simply-connected, smooth $4$-manifolds as building blocks. We explicitly determine the invariants that classify these $6$-manifolds from the intersection form and specific homology classes of the $4$-manifold building blocks.
We show that for every sequence $(n_i)$, where each $n_i$ is either an integer greater than 1 or is $\infty$, there exists a simply connected open 3-manifold $M$ with a countable dense set of ends $\{e_i\}$ so that, for every $i$, the genus of end $e_i$ is equal to $n_i$. In addition, the genus of the ends not in the dense set is shown to be less than or equal to 2. These simply connected 3-manifolds are constructed as the complements of certain Cantor sets in $S^3$. The methods used require careful analysis of the genera of ends and new techniques for dealing with infinite genus.
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn（波恩马克斯·普朗克数学研究所）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）
The aim of this paper is to classify simply connected 6-dimensional torus manifolds with vanishing odd degree cohomology. It is shown that there is a one-to-one correspondence between equivariant diffeomorphism types of these manifolds and 3-valent labelled graphs, called torus graphs introduced by Maeda-Masuda-Panov. Using this correspondence and combinatorial arguments, we prove that a simply connected 6-dimensional torus manifold with vanishing odd degree cohomology is equivariantly diffeomorphic to the 6-dimensional sphere or an equivariant connected sum of copies of 6-dimensional quasitor…
We construct branched double coverings by certain direct products of manifolds for connected sums of copies of sphere bundles over the 2-sphere. As an application we answer a question of Kotschick and Loeh up to dimension five. More precisely, we show that: (1) every simply connected, closed four-manifold admits a branched double covering by a product of the circle with a connected sum of copies of $S^2 \times S^1$, followed by a collapsing map; (2) every simply connected, closed five-manifold admits a branched double covering by a product of the circle with a connected sum of copies of $S^3 \…
Questions of geography of various classes of $4$-manifolds have been a central motivating question in $4$-manifold topology. Baykur and Korkmaz asked which small, simply connected, minimal $4$-manifolds admit a genus $2$ Lefschetz fibration. They were able to classify all the possible homeomorphism types and realize all but one with the exception of a genus $2$ Lefschetz fibration on a symplectic $4$-manifold homeomorphic, but not diffeomorphic to $3 \mathbb{CP}^2 \# 11\overline{\mathbb{CP}}^2$. We give a positive factorization of type $(10,10)$ that corresponds to such a genus $2$ Lefschetz f…
The Torelli group, I(S_g), is the subgroup of the mapping class group consisting of elements that act trivially on the homology of the surface. There are three types of elements that naturally arise in studying I(S_g): bounding pair maps, separating twists, and simply intersecting pair maps (SIP-maps). Historically the first two types of elements have been the focus of the literature on I(S_g), while SIP-maps have received relatively little attention until recently, due to an infinite presentation of I(S_g) introduced by Andrew Putman that uses all three types of elements. We will give a topol…
A singular riemannian foliation on a complete riemannian manifold is said to be riemannian if each geodesic that is perpendicular at one point to a leaf remains perpendicular to every leaf it meets. The singular foliation is said to admit sections if each regular point is contained in a totally geodesic complete immersed submanifold that meets every leaf orthogonally and whose dimension is the codimension of the regular leaves. A typical example of such singular foliation is the partition by orbits of a polar action,e.g. the orbits of the adjoint action of a compact Lie group on itself. We pro…
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 techn…
We classify, up to homeomorphisms, the closed simply-connected 4-manifolds that admit a Riemannian metric for which averages of pairs of sectional curvatures of orthogonal planes are positive.
We will describe some results regarding the algorithmic nature of homeomorphism problems for manifolds; in particular, the following theorem. Theorem 1: Every PL or smooth simply connected manifold M^n of dimension n at least 5 can be recognized among simply connected manifolds. That is, there is an algorithm to decide whether or not another simply connected manifold is Top, PL or Diff isomorphic to M. Moreover, an analogous statement is true for embeddings in codimension at least three: one can algorithmically recognize any given embedding of one simply connected manifold in another up to iso…
For every $k \geq 2$ and $n \geq 2$ we construct $n$ pairwise homotopically inequivalent simply-connected, closed $4k$-dimensional manifolds, all of which are stably diffeomorphic to one another. Each of these manifolds has hyperbolic intersection form and is stably parallelisable. In dimension $4$, we exhibit an analogous phenomenon for spin$^{c}$ structures on $S^2 \times S^2$. For $m\geq 1$, we also provide similar $(4m{-}1)$-connected $8m$-dimensional examples, where the number of homotopy types in a stable diffeomorphism class is related to the order of the image of the stable $J$-homomor…
We consider mapping class groups Γ(M) = pi_0 Diff(M fix \partial M) of smooth compact simply connected oriented 4-manifolds M bounded by a collection of 3-spheres. We show that if M contains CP^2 (with either orientation) as a connected summand then Γ(M) is independent of the number of boundary components. By repackaging classical results of Wall, Kreck and Quinn, we show that the natural homomorphism from the mapping class group to the group of automorphisms of the intersection form becomes an isomorphism after stabilization with respect to connected sum with CP^2 # \bar{CP^2}. We next consid…
