Representing homology classes by locally flat 2-spheres (Q1317445)

This paper proves that the well known necessary conditions on representing a homology class in a closed, oriented, simply connected 4- manifold by a locally flat embedding of a 2-sphere are in fact also sufficient. Also uniqueness results for such embeddings are proved under additional assumptions. The necessary conditions come from Rokhlin's theorem on the signature of a spin 4-manifold and the \(G\)-signature theorem applied to the branched covering along the embedded 2-sphere. To construct the embeddings the authors use M. Freedman's extension of surgery theory for finite cyclic fundamental groups to dimension 4 (in particular all constructions fail in the smooth category). The existence of the embedding then follows from a purely algebraic statement about splitting off hyperbolic forms from a pointed Hermitian module (the intersection form of the branched covering) over the group ring of the cyclic group.