We produce a rational homology 3-sphere that does not smoothly bound either a positive or negative definite 4-manifold. Such a 3-manifold necessarily cannot be rational homology cobordant to a Seifert fibered space or any 3-manifold obtained by Dehn surgery on a knot. The proof requires an analysis of short characteristic covectors in bimodular lattices.
In this paper, we prove that any closed orientable 3-manifold $M$ other than $#^k S^1times S^2$ and $S^3$ satisfies the following properties: (1) For any compact orientable 4-manifold $N$ bounded by $M$, the inclusion does not induce an isomorphism on their fundamental groups $pi_1$. (2) For any map $f:Mto N$ from $M$ to a closed orientable 4-manifold $N$, $f$ does not induce an isomorphism on $pi_1$. Relevant results on higher dimensional manifolds are also obtained.
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.
In cite{MR1957829}, Ozsvath and Szabo use Heegaard Floer homology to define numerical invariants $d_{1/2}$ and $d_{-1/2}$ for 3-manifolds $Y$ with $H_{1}(Y;mathbb{Z})cong mathbb{Z}$. We define involutive Heegaard Floer theoret
Let $W$ be a compact smooth $4$-manifold that deformation retract to a PL embedded closed surface. One can arrange the embedding to have at most one non-locally-flat point, and near the point the topology of the embedding is encoded in the singularity knot $K$. If $K$ is slice, then $W$ has a smooth spine, i.e., deformation retracts onto a smoothly embedded surface. Using the obstructions from the Heegaard Floer homology and the high-dimensional surgery theory, we show that $W$ has no smooth spines if $K$ is a knot with nonzero Arf invariant, a nontrivial L-space knot, the connected sum of nontrivial L-space knots, or an alternating knot of signature $<-4$. We also discuss examples where the interior of $W$ is negatively curved.