Definite 4-manifolds (Q1113489)

In this short paper the authors give a greatly simplified proof of the following theorem, originally proved by the reviewer [ibid. 26, 397-428 (1987)] and \textit{M. Furuta} [J. Fac. Sci., Univ. Tokyo, Sect. I A 34, 275-297 (1987; Zbl 0653.57005)]: Theorem. If X is a smooth, simply connected, oriented, compact 4-manifold with a positive definite intersection form and such that \(H_ 1(X;{\mathbb{Z}})\) has no 2-torsion then the intersection form of X is diagonalizable over the integers. The proof of the reviewer [loc. cit.] establishes a more general result, without any assumption on \(H_ 1(X)\), this can probably also be obtained by the methods of the paper under review. The technique the authors use is a generalization of their proof in an earlier paper [J. Differ. Geom. 20, 523-539 (1984; Zbl 0562.53023)] using moduli spaces of anti-self-dual SO(3) connections. The problems of compactness which limited the applicability of the argument in that paper are overcome by cutting the moduli spaces down using codimension-2 cycles representing well-known cohomology classes.