No Arabic abstract
We study the set $widehat{mathcal S}_M$ of framed smoothly slice links which lie on the boundary of the complement of a 1-handlebody in a closed, simply connected, smooth 4-manifold $M$. We show that $widehat{mathcal S}_M$ is well-defined and describe how it relates to exotic phenomena in dimension four. In particular, in the case when $X$ is smooth, with a handle decompositions with no 1-handles and homeomorphic to but not smoothly embeddable in $D^4$, our results tell us that $X$ is exotic if and only if there is a link $Lhookrightarrow S^3$ which is smoothly slice in $X$, but not in $D^4$. Furthermore, we extend the notion of high genus 2-handle attachment, introduced by Hayden and Piccirillo, to prove that exotic 4-disks that are smoothly embeddable in $D^4$, and therefore possible counterexamples to the smooth 4-dimensional Schonflies conjecture, cannot be distinguished from $D^4$ only by comparing the slice genus functions of links.
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 $mgeq 1$, 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 $J$-homomorphism $pi_{4m-1}(SO) to pi^s_{4m-1}$.
Let $G$ be a simply-connected simple compact Lie group and let $M$ be an orientable smooth closed 4-manifold. In this paper we calculate the homotopy type of the suspension of $M$ and the homotopy types of the gauge groups of principal $G$-bundles over $M$ when $pi_1(M)$ is: (1)~$mathbb{Z}^{*m}$, (2)~$mathbb{Z}/p^rmathbb{Z}$, or (3)~$mathbb{Z}^{*m}*(*^n_{j=1}mathbb{Z}/p_j^{r_j}mathbb{Z})$, where $p$ and the $p_j$s are odd primes.
We attach copies of the circle to points of a countable dense subset $D$ of a separable metric space $X$ and construct an earring space $E(X,D)$. We show that the fundamental group of $E(X,D)$ is isomorphic to a subgroup of the Hawaiian earring group, if the space $X$ is simply-connected and locally simply-connected. In addition if the space $X$ is locally path-connected, the space $X$ can be recovered from the fundamental group of $E(X,D)$.
We study several questions on the existence of negative Sasakian structures on simply connected rational homology spheres and on Smale-Barden manifolds of the form $#_k(S^2times S^3)$. First, we prove that any simply connected rational homology sphere admitting positive Sasakian structures also admits a negative one. This result answers the question, posed by Boyer and Galicki in their book [BG], of determining which simply connected rational homology spheres admit both negative and positive Sasakian structures. Second, we prove that the connected sum $#_k(S^2times S^3)$ admits negative quasi-regular Sasakian structures for any $k$. This yields a complete answer to another question posed in [BG].
Using the topologist sine curve we present a new functorial construction of cone-like spaces, starting in the category of all path-connected topological spaces with a base point and continuous maps, and ending in the subcategory of all simply connected spaces. If one starts by a noncontractible n-dimensional Peano continuum for any n>0, then our construction yields a simply connected noncontractible (n + 1)-dimensional cell-like Peano continuum. In particular, starting with the circle $mathbb{S}^1$, one gets a noncontractible simply connected cell-like 2-dimensional Peano continuum.