Rational blowdowns of smooth 4-manifolds (Q1383634)

In this beautiful paper, the authors study a surgical procedure on smooth 4-manifolds, called rational blowdown, and determine how this procedure affects the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants. The rational blowdown procedure completes the full computation of the Donaldson series (and the Seiberg-Witten invariants) of all elliptic surfaces with \(p_g\geq 1\). As a consequence, one reobtains the diffeomorphism classification of simply-connected elliptic surfaces \(E(n;p,q)\), \(n\geq 2\), with \(p_g= n-1\) and multiple fibers of relatively prime orders \(p,q\geq 1\). Finally, the authors use the rational blowdown procedure to compute the Donaldson series and the Seiberg-Witten invariants for many smooth 4-manifolds and for most of the currently known examples of 4-manifolds which are not even homotopy equivalent to complex surfaces.