arXiv research

The paper classifies fiber structures of discontinuity domains for Anosov representations.

We discuss some consequences Fintushel-Stern `knot surgery' operation on 4-manifolds coming from its handlebody description. We give some generalizations of this operation and give a counterexample to their conjecture.

A theorem of Furuta and Fintushel-Stern provides a criterion for a collection of Seifert fibred homology spheres to be independent in the homology cobordism group of oriented homology 3-spheres. In this article we use these results and some 4-dimensional constructions to produce infinite families of positive torus knot…

We establish an inequality which gives strong restrictions on when the standard definite plumbing intersection lattice of a Seifert fibered space over $S^2$ can embed into a standard diagonal lattice, and give two applications. First, we answer a question of Neumann-Zagier on the relationship between Donaldson's theore…

Suppose that $X$ is a torus bundle over a closed surface with homologically essential fibers. Let $X_K$ be the manifold obtained by Fintushel--Stern knot surgery on a fiber using a knot $K\subset S^3$. We prove that $X_K$ has a symplectic structure if and only if $K$ is a fibered knot. The proof uses Seiberg--Witten th…

We show that there is a well-defined cap-product structure on the Fintushel-Stern spectral sequence. Hence we obtain the induced cap-product structure on the ${\BZ}_8$-graded instanton Floer homology. The cap-product structure provides an essentially new property of the instanton Floer homology, from a topological poin…

The rational homology balls $B_n$ appeared in Fintushel and Stern's rational blow-down construction [FS] and were subsequently used (e.g. Fintushel-Stern[FS4], Park[Pa2]) to construct exotic smooth manifolds with small Euler numbers. We show that a large class of smooth 4-manifolds have all of the $B_n$'s for odd $n \g…

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 decomp…

Motivated by a construction of Fintushel and Stern, we show that the topological 4--manifold $CP^2#5{\bar CP^2}$ supports infinitely many distinct smooth structures.

We prove that the rational blowdown, a surgery on smooth 4-manifolds introduced by Fintushel and Stern, can be performed in the symplectic category. As a consequence, interesting families of smooth 4-manifolds, including the exotic $K3$ surfaces of Gompf and Mrowka, admit symplectic structures.

We discuss the relation between Fintushel-Stern knot surgery operation on 4-manifolds and Scharlemann manifolds, and as a corollary show that they all are standard. Along the way we show that the fishtail can exotically knot in the 4-sphere infinitely many ways.

We review the SO(3) instanton gauge theory of Fintushel and Stern and recast it in the context of 4-manifolds with cylindrical ends. Appli- cations to the Z/2-homology cobordism group of Z/2-homology 3-spheres are given.

In this article we prove that Fintushel-Stern's construction of Horikawa surface, which is obtained from an elliptic surface via a rational blow-down surgery in smooth category, can be performed in complex category. The main technique involved is Q-Gorenstein smoothings.

In this paper we show that there exists a family of simply connected, symplectic 4-manifolds such that the (Poincare dual of the) canonical class admits both connected and disconnected symplectic representatives. This answers a question raised by Fintushel and Stern.

In this note we present a new definition of the 4-manifold admitting inequivalent symplectic structures constructed by McMullen-Taubes which leads to the identification of a new symplectic structure. We prove moreover that it is diffeomorphic to one of the link surgery manifolds introduced by Fintushel-Stern.

As an application of `reverse engineering' technique introduced by R. Fintushel, D. Park and R. Stern \cite{FPS}, we construct an infinite family of fake (2n+2l-1)CP^2#(2n+4l-1)(-CP^2)'s for all n \ge 0, l \ge 1.

In this note we prove that, for any integer n, there exist a smooth 4-manifold, homotopic to a K3 surface, defined by applying the link surgery method of Fintushel-Stern to a certain 2-component graph link, which admits n inequivalent symplectic structures Keywords: Symplectic topology of 4-manifolds; Seiberg-Witten th…

In this article, we show that, at least for non-simply connected case, there exist an infinite family of nondiffeomorphic symplectic 4-manifolds with the same Seiberg-Witten invariants. The main techniques are knot surgery and a covering method developed in Fintushel and Stern's paper (Geometry and Topology, 1999).

Generalized Donaldson invariants of 4-manifolds are defined, using moduli spaces of anti-self-dual connections with structure group SU(N) or PSU(N). Some values of the invariants are calculated for the case that the 4-manifold arises by the knot-complement construction of Fintushel and Stern. The results are consistent…

Some generalizations and variations of the Fintushel-Stern rim surgery are known to produce smoothly knotted surfaces. We show that if the fundamental groups of their complements are cyclic, then these surfaces are topologically unknotted. Using a twist-spinning construction from high-dimensional knot theory, we constr…

Fintushel and Stern have proved that if S \subset X is a symplectic surface in a symplectic 4-manifold such that S has simply-connected complement and nonnegative self-intersection, then there are infinitely many topologically equivalent but smoothly distinct embedded surfaces homologous to S. Here we extend this resul…

We determine the smooth concordance order of the 3-stranded pretzel knots P(p,q,r) with p,q,r odd. We show that each one of finite order is, in fact, ribbon, thereby proving the slice-ribbon conjecture for this family of knots. As corollaries we give new proofs of results first obtained by Fintushel-Stern and Casson-Go…

In this paper we clarify an issue in the knot surgery construction of Fintushel and Stern. Using knot surgery, they construct an infinite number of smooth structures on 4-manifolds satisfying certain conditions, but they do not explicitly work out the circumstances under which two manifolds that arise from their constr…

Since the first work on exotic smoothness in physics, it was folklore to assume a direct influence of exotic smoothness to quantum gravity. Thus, the negative result of Duston (arXiv:0911.4068) was a surprise. A closer look into the semi-classical approach uncovered the implicit assumption of a close connection between…

Fintushel-Stern's knot surgery gave many pairs of exotic manifolds, which are homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic. We show that if an elliptic fibration has two parallel, oppositely oriented vanishing circles (for example $S^2\times S^2$ or Matsumoto's $S^4$), then the knot surgery gives rise to standard manifolds. The …

We construct an obstruction for the existence of embeddings of homology $3$-sphere into homology $S^3\times S^1$ under some cohomological condition. The obstruction is defined as an element in the filtered version of the instanton Floer cohomology due to R.Fintushel-R.Stern. We make use of the $\mathbb{Z}$-fold coverin…

We show that the SO(3) monopole cobordism formula from Feehan and Leness (2002) implies that all smooth, closed, oriented four-manifolds with $b^1=0$ and $b^+\geq 3$ and odd with Seiberg-Witten simple type satisfy the superconformal simple type condition defined by Marino, Moore, and Peradze (1999) This implies the low…

In this short article we give a criterion whether a given minimal symplectic 4-manifold with $b_{2}^{+}=1$ having a torsion-free canonical class is rational or ruled. As a corollary, we confirm that most of homotopy elliptic surfaces $E(1}_{K}$, K is a fibered knot in $S^3$, constructed by R. Fintushel and R. Stern are…

In this paper, we investigate existence of inequivalent smooth structures on closed smooth non-orientable 4-manifolds building upon results of Akbulut, Cappell-Shaneson, Fintushel-Stern, Gompf, and Stolz. We add to the number of known constructions and provide new examples of exotic manifolds that are obtained as an ap…

We define a new 4-dimensional symplectic cut and paste operation which is analogous to Fintushel and Stern's rational blow-down. We use this operation to produce multiple constructions of symplectic smoothly exotic complex projective space blown-up eight times, seven times, and six times. We also show how this operatio…

In this paper, we derive the family switching formula of -n two-sphere fiber bundle embedded in a smooth four-manifold fiber bundle. In the smooth category, it is a partial generalization of Fintushel-Stern's argument for four-manifolds. We also derive an algebraic analogue of the family switching formula, allowing the…

We construct an invariant for non-spin 4-manifolds by using 2-torsion cohomology classes of moduli spaces of instantons on SO(3)-bundles. The invariant is an SO(3)-version of Fintushel-Stern's 2-torsion instanton invariant. We show that this SO(3)-torsion invariant is non-trivial for $2CP^2 # -CP^2$, while it is known …

In 1987 S Cappell and J Shaneson constructed an s-cobordism H from the quaternionic 3-manifold Q to itself, and asked whether H or any of its covers are trivial product cobordism? In this paper we study H, and in particular show that its 8-fold cover is the product cobordism from S^3 to itself. We reduce the triviality…

Suppose that $C=(C_1,..., C_m)$ is a configuration of 2-dimensional symplectic submanifolds in a symplectic 4-manifold $(X,ω)$ with connected, negative definite intersection graph $Γ_C$. We show that by replacing an appropriate neighborhood of $\cup C_i$ with a smoothing $W_S$ of a normal surface singularity $(S, 0)$ w…

The purpose of this note is to present a construction of an infinite family of symplectic tori T_{p} representing an arbitrary multiple of the homology class of the fiber of an elliptic surface E(n), for n > 2, such that, for i \neq j, there is no orientation-preserving diffeomorphism between (E(n),T_{i}) and (E(n),T_{…

Let E(1)_K denote the closed 4-manifold that is homotopy equivalent (hence homeomorphic) to the rational elliptic surface E(1) and is obtained by performing Fintushel-Stern knot surgery on E(1) using a knot K in S^3. We construct an infinite family of homologous non-isotopic symplectic tori representing a primitive hom…

A branched twist spin is a generalization of twist spun knots, which appeared in the study of locally smooth circle actions on the $4$-sphere due to Montgomery, Yang, Fintushel and Pao. In this paper, we give a sufficient condition to distinguish non-equivalent, non-trivial branched twist spins by using knot determinan…

The union of singular orbits of an effective locally smooth circle action on the 4-sphere consists of two 2-knots, $K$ and $K^{\prime}$, intersecting at two points transversely. Each of $K$ and $K^{\prime}$ is called a branched twist spin. A twist spun knot is an example of a branched twist spin. The Gluck twists along…

For each integral homology sphere $Y$, a function $Γ_Y$ on the set of integers is constructed. It is established that $Γ_Y$ depends only on the homology cobordism of $Y$ and it recovers the Frøyshov invariant. A relation between $Γ_Y$ and Fintushel-Stern's $R$-invariant is stated. It is shown that the value of $Γ_Y$ at…

We study the symplectic topology of some finite algebraic quotients of the An Milnor fibre which are diffeomorphic to the rational homology balls that appear in Fintushel and Stern's rational blowdown construction. We prove that these affine surfaces have no closed exact Lagrangian submanifolds by using the already ava…

In this paper, we will introduce a cut and paste move, called a geometrically null log transform, and prove that any two manifolds related by a sequence of these moves become diffeomorphic afte r one stabilization. To motivate the cut and paste move, we will use the symplec tic fiber sum, and a construction of Fintushe…

We introduce several new families of relations in the mapping class groups of planar surfaces, each equating two products of right-handed Dehn twists. The interest of these relations lies in their geometric interpretation in terms of rational blowdowns of 4-manifolds, specifically via monodromy substitution in Lefschet…

New exotic 4-manifolds with even $b_2^+$ and $\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z}$ fundamental group.

Let $X$ be a simply connected 4-manifold containing a $(-1)$-sphere $e$. Fintushel and Stern prove that $D_c(\exp(te)) = D_c(B(t)) on e^\perp if c\cdot e is even,$ $D_c(\exp(te)) = D_{c-e}(S(t)) on e^\perp if c \cdot e is odd,$ for some universal series $B(t),S(t) \in \Q[x][[t]]$ with $x$ the class of a point. …

Given a simply-connected closed 4-manifold $X$ and a smoothly embedded oriented surface $Σ$, various constructions based on Fintushel-Stern knot surgery have produced new surfaces in $X$ that are pairwise homeomorphic to $Σ$, but not diffeomorphic. We prove that for all known examples of surface knots constructed from …

We call an integral homology sphere $\textit{non-trivially}$ bounds a rational homology ball if it is obstructed from bounding an integral homology ball. After Fintushel and Stern's well-known example $Σ(2,3,7)$, Akbulut and Larson recently provided the first infinite families of Brieskorn spheres non-trivially boundin…

Paper examines 4-manifold structures using chord assignments.

We formulate a very general conjecture relating the analytical invariants of a normal surface singularity to the Seiberg-Witten invariants of its link provided that the link is a rational homology sphere. As supporting evidence, we establish its validity for a large class of singularities: some rational and minimally e…