On smoothable surgery for 4-manifolds
arXiv:math/0702074 · doi:10.2140/agt.2007.7.2117
Abstract
Under certain homological hypotheses on a compact 4-manifold, we prove exactness of the topological surgery sequence at the stably smoothable normal invariants. The main examples are the class of finite connected sums of 4-manifolds with certain product geometries. Most of these compact manifolds have non-vanishing second mod 2 homology and have fundamental groups of exponential growth, which are not known to be tractable by Freedman-Quinn topological surgery. Necessarily, the *-construction of certain non-smoothable homotopy equivalences requires surgery on topologically embedded 2-spheres and is not attacked here by transversality and cobordism.
18 pages, separated into two journal submissions