Surgery, Yamabe invariant, and Seiberg-Witten theory (Q1004306)

The Yamabe invariant of a manifold is the supremum over all conformal classes of the infima of the total scalar curvature of a volume one conformal representative. Of course the Gauss-Bonnet theorem specifies the Yamabe invariant of a closed surface. Geometrization yields results in three dimensions. In higher dimensions it becomes more difficult to compute. There is a good understanding of gluing along codimension three an higher submanifolds. In four dimensions the Seiberg-Witten invariants may be used to derive results about the Yamabe invariant. In this paper, C. Sung uses gluing results from Seiberg-Witten theory to derive more information about the Yamabe invariant. In particular, he proves that \(Y(M\#N)=Y(M)\) when \(M\) is a Kähler surface of non-negative Kodaira dimension and \(N\) is a negative-definite \(4\)-manifold with non-negative Yamabe invariant. Also the same result holds for \(M=\mathbb{C}P^2\) and \(N\) with no second homology. There is a result for surgery along circles. There is also a result for fiber sums and internal fiber sums of products of surfaces and manifolds of the form \(S^1\times Y\) where \(Y\) is a \(3\)-manifold with non-zero Seiberg-Witten invariants. Here the fiber sums are taken along special tori.