Exotic surfaces in 4-manifolds, stabilizations, and framings.
MALECH, OLIVIERO
2025-09-09
Abstract
We show that many explicit examples of exotic pairs of surfaces in a smooth 4-manifold become
smoothly isotopic after one external stabilization with S^2×S^2 or CP^2#-CP^2. Our results cover
surfaces produced by rim-surgery, twist-rim-surgery, annulus rim-surgery, as well as infinite families
of nullhomologous surfaces and examples with non-cyclic fundamental group of the complement. A
special attention is given to the identification of the stabilizing manifold and its dependence on the
choices in the construction of the surface. The main idea of this thesis is given by relating internal
and external stabilization, and most of the results, but not all, are proved using this relation.
Moreover, we show that the 2-links in the exotic family constructed by the author of this thesis, in
a joint work with Bais, Benyahia and Torres, are brunnian, i.e., they become smoothly unlinked if
any of the components is removed.