On the orders of periodic diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds (Q627323)

The paper investigates group actions on manifolds admitting no circle action. The main result is the following: Let \(X\) be a complex surface of non-negative Kodaira dimension. Suppose that \(X\) admits no holomorphic circle action. Then there exists a constant \(C>0\) such that there are no nontrivial holomorphic actions of the cyclic group of prime order bigger than \(C\). Moreover, the constant \(C\) depends linearly on the Betti numbers of \(X\) and the order of the torsion in the second homology of \(X\). The author provides examples showing that the above constant is sharp in a suitable sense. He also proves an analogous statement for symplectic actions on certain symplectic 4-manifolds.