The groups of diffeomorphisms and homeomorphisms of 4-manifolds with boundary

TL;DR

This paper uses advanced invariants from Seiberg-Witten theory to show that the groups of diffeomorphisms and homeomorphisms of certain 4-manifolds with boundary are not homotopy equivalent, revealing new topological constraints.

Contribution

It introduces new constraints on smooth families of 4-manifolds with boundary using Manolescu's invariants, extending previous results to manifolds with boundary.

Findings

The inclusion map from diffeomorphisms to homeomorphisms is not a weak homotopy equivalence under certain conditions.

Constraints generalize previous results on closed 4-manifolds and boundary cases.

Provides obstructions to smooth structures on 4-manifolds with boundary.

Abstract

We give constraints on smooth families of 4-manifolds with boundary using Manolescu's Seiberg-Witten Floer stable homotopy type, provided that the fiberwise restrictions of the families to the boundaries are trivial families of 3-manifolds. As an application, we show that, for a simply-connected oriented compact smooth 4-manifold $X$ with boundary with an assumption on the Fr{\o}yshov invariant or the Manolescu invariants $\alpha, \beta, \gamma$ of $\partial X$, the inclusion map $\mathrm{Diff}(X,\partial) \hookrightarrow \mathrm{Homeo}(X,\partial)$ between the groups of diffeomorphisms and homeomorphisms which fix the boundary pointwise is not a weak homotopy equivalence. This combined with a classical result in dimension 3 implies that the inclusion map $\mathrm{Diff}(X) \hookrightarrow \mathrm{Homeo}(X)$ is also not a weak homotopy equivalence under the same assumption on $\partial X$. Our constraints generalize both of constraints on smooth families of closed 4-manifolds proven by Baraglia and a Donaldson-type theorem for smooth 4-manifolds with boundary originally due to Fr{\o}yshov.