A stable cohomotopy refinement of Seiberg-Witten invariants. II (Q1434281)

In part I of this paper [ibid., 1--19 (2004; Zbl 1050.57024)], the authors define a refinement of the Seiberg-Witten invariants by studying the homotopy-theoretic properties of the Seiberg-Witten monopole map (instead of the moduli space of Seiberg-Witten solutions). For a \(4\)-manifold \(X\) this yields an invariant \([\mu_X]\) living in the the equivariant stable cohomotopy group \[ \pi^{b^+}_{S^1, H} (Pic(X); \text{ind}(D)), \] where \(b^+\) is the dimension of a maximal positive definite subspace of the \(2\)-cohomology, \(\text{Pic}(X)=H^1(X;\mathbb{R})/H^1(X;\mathbb{Z})\) is the Picard torus, \(\text{ind}(D)\rightarrow \text{Pic}(X)\) is the complex index bundle associated to the Dirac operator \(D\), \(H\) stands for a suitable Hilbert space in which \(S^1\) acts (necessary to define the stable cohomotopy group). This paper is devoted to the computation of the stable cohomotopy Seiberg-Witten invariant for a connected sum \(X=X_0\# X_1\) of two \(4\)-manifolds. The main result is that \([\mu_X]\) is the smash product \([\mu_{X_0}] \wedge [\mu_{X_1}]\). The proof of this goes through a ``stretching the neck'' argument, where the equations are deformed and reglued for the connected sum (see [\textit{S. Donaldson}, Floer homology groups in Yang-Mills theory, Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics, Cambridge University Press (2002; Zbl 0998.53057)] for a similar argument in Yang-Mills theory). As applications, this result allows to detect, for some connected sums of two, three or even four \(4\)-manifolds, topological properties of the factors. For instance, if a connected sum of two or three simply connected minimal elliptic surfaces of odd geometric genus is diffeomorphic to another connected sum of elliptic surfaces, then there are the same number of factors and they are the same. This result is in contrast with the vanishing for the usual Seiberg-Witten invariants for any connected sum \(X=X_0\# X_1\) in which both factors have \(b^+>0\).