Invent. math. 117:455-523 (1994) Inventiones mathematicae Springer-Verlag1994 Surgery in cusp neighborhoods and the geography of irreducible 4-manifolds Ronald FintusheP and Ronaid J. Stern 2"* 1Department of Mathematics, Michigan State University,East Lansing,MI 48824, USA E-mail:
[email protected] 2Department of Mathematics, Universityof California,Irvine, CA92717, USA
[email protected] Oblatum 9-I-1993 & 16-XI-1993 1 Introduction Since its inception, the theory of smooth 4-manifolds has relied upon complex surface theory to provide its basic examples. This is especially true for simply connected 4-manifolds: a longstanding conjecture held that every smooth simply connected closed 4-manifold is the connected sum of manifolds, each admitting a complex structure with one of its orientations. (For this conjec- ture, the 4-sphere was considered as the empty connected sum.) Quite recently, this was disproved by Gompf and Mrowka [GM1] who produced infinite families of examples of 4-manifolds homeomorphic to the K3 surface and which admit no complex structure with either orientation. The discovery of these dramatic counterexamples to the h-cobordism theorem in dimension 4 was the most recent success in a long line of applications of Donaldson invariants to the study of smooth structures on 4-manifolds, beginning with Donaldson's [D4], and followed by [FM1, Ko, OV1, OV2] which depended on Donaldson's F-invariant or a suitable generalization, and [FMM, DK, E2, EO1, Mn2, Sa], using Donaldson's polynomial invariant. A common thread running through many of these counterexamples to the h-cobordism conjecture is the process of logarithmic transformation which introduces multiple fibres in an elliptic surface.