Pinwheels and nullhomologous surgery on 4-manifolds with \(b^+=1\) (Q541303)

The motivating question for this paper is whether every simply-connected smooth 4-manifold \(X\) with \(\beta^+>0\) has infinitely many inequivalent smooth structures. This is known to be so when \(X\) is obtained from the complex projective plane by blowing up at least two points. The main innovation here is the notion of ``pinwheel structure'', which is a generalization of ``\(k\)-fold symmetric sum'', due to \textit{M. Symington} [``A new symplectic surgery: the \(3\)-fold sum'', Topology Appl. 88, No. 1--2, 27--53 (1998; Zbl 0957.53045)]. This is used with the ``reverse engineering'' of the authors to show that if \(2\leq{k}\leq7\) and \(X=\mathbb{C}^2\#^k\overline{\mathbb{CP}^2}\) then such infinite families of smoothings can be be obtained by surgery on null-homologous tori in the standard smoothing of \(X\). (The surgery tori are Bing doubles of standard tori embedded in the pinwheel components.) The result holds also when \(k=9\), but technical difficulties inhibit further extension at present.