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Stabilisation, bordism and embedded spheres in 4--manifolds

Christian Bohr
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Abstract

It is one of the most important facts in 4-dimensional topology that not every spherical homology class of a 4-manifold can be represented by an embedded sphere. In 1978, M. Freedman and R. Kirby showed that in the simply connected case, many of the obstructions to constructing such a sphere vanish if one modifies the ambient 4-manifold by adding products of 2-spheres, a process which is usually called stabilisation. In this paper, we extend this result to non-simply connected 4-manifolds and show how it is related to the Spin^c-bordism groups of Eilenberg-MacLane spaces.

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Christian Bohr. 2000-12-22. Stabilisation, bordism and embedded spheres in 4--manifolds. https://doi.org/10.2140/agt.2002.2.219

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