No homotopy 4-sphere invariants using ECH=SWF (Q2667203)

The article under review is concerned with exotic smooth structures on \(S^4\), that is, the well-known \(4\)-dimensional smooth Poincaré conjecture. Concretely, it is conjectured that if \(X\) is a homotopy \(4\)-sphere, then \(X\) is diffeomorphic to \(S^4\) (hence, no exotic structures). Note that, on the topological level, a celebrated result from [\textit{M. Freedman}, J. Differ. Geom. 17, 357--453 (1982; Zbl 0528.57011)] shows that \(X\) is homeomorphic to \(S^4\). The main result of this article demonstrates an insightful but failed approach to detect an exotic structure on \(S^4\), by constructing an invariant denoted by \(\mathrm{Gr}_{X, \omega}\) and showing that in fact it can be identified with the relative Seiberg-Witten invariant that is, unfortunately, not effective to such a detection. The entire discussion in this article is within the following manifold \[ X^* = X - \{\text{a small standard closed 4-ball in }X\}, \] since \(X^*\) admits a symplectic 2-form. In fact, \(X^*\) admits a near-symplectic 2-form \(\omega\) (so, in particular, at some point \(x \in X^*\), we have \(\omega(x) = 0\)) such that \((X^*, \omega)\) agrees with \((\mathbb R^4, \omega_{\mathrm{std}})\) outside a compact set. This was claimed in [\textit{C. Taubes}, Math. Res. Lett. 13, No. 4, 557--570 (2006; Zbl 1151.57032)] and a complete proof is provided in this article. The (Gromov)-invariant \(\mathrm{Gr}_{X, \omega}\) is a homology class in the embedded contact homology, denoted by \(\mathrm{ECH}\), of the contact manifold \(\partial \mathcal N\) where \(\mathcal N\) is a suitable neighborhood of the zero-circles \(\omega^{-1}(0)\), and it is defined via a counting of punctured pseudo-holomorphic curves in a completion of \(X^* - \mathcal N\). The proof of the identification of these two invariants comes from a careful investigation on how a certain moduli space behaves when neck-stretching along the boundary \(\partial \mathcal N\), together with Taubes' isomorphism that transfers the information between \(\mathrm{ECH}\) and a monopole Floer homology.