The link surgery of \(S^2 \times S^2\) and Scharlemann's manifolds (Q2451097)

In [Invent. Math. 134 (2), 363--400 (1998; Zbl 0914.57015)], \textit{R. Fintushel} and \textit{R. J. Stern} introduced a powerful operation (known as \textit{Fintushel-Stern's knot surgery}) on a simply-connected smooth 4-manifold \(X\), so that the resulting 4-manifold is homeomorphic to \(X\), but can be distinguished smoothly from \(X\) by the Seiberg-Witten invariant whenever the Alexander polynomial of the involved knot is non-trivial. During the last decades, Fintushel-Stern's knot surgery made it possible to produce many exotic 4-manifolds. The present paper shows that there are a lot of examples of Fintushel-Stern's knot surgery which do not produce exotic pairs: in fact, the author proves that, if an elliptic fibration has two parallel oppositely-oriented vanishing cycles (as it happens in \(\mathbb S^2 \times \mathbb S^2\) or Matsumoto's \(\mathbb S^4\)), then the knot surgery does not change the differential structure. As a consequence, the author generalizes a well-known result by \textit{S. Akbulut} [Turk. J. Math. 23, No. 1, 19--31 (1999; Zbl 0947.57024)], concerning knot surgery on \(\mathbb S^2 \times \mathbb S^2\). The paper takes into account also link surgery by Fintushel and Stern, and yields a complete classification of link surgery of \(\mathbb S^2 \times \mathbb S^2\) . Moreover, the author generalizes to an arbitrary knot Akbulut's celebrated result that \textit{Scharlemann's manifold} is standard (see [\textit{S. Akbulut}, Ann. Math. (2) 149, No. 2, 497--510 (1999; Zbl 0931.57016)]). \smallskip As the author himself points out, some results have also been independently obtained in [\textit{S. Akbulut}, Forum Math. 25 (3), 639-645 (2013; Zbl 1270.57062)]; however, the present proofs involve different techniques, based essentially on knot surgery in some achiral elliptic fibration.