Isotopy classes of involutions of del Pezzo surfaces (Q6103487)

A \textit{del Pezzo surface} is a smooth projective algebraic surface with ample anticanonical divisor class; the smooth 4-manifold underlying a del Pezzo surface is called a \textit{del Pezzo manifold}, diffeomorphic to the connected sum \(M_n=\mathbb{CP}^2 \; \sharp \; n \, \overline {\mathbb{CP}^2}\), \(0 \le n \le 8\) (the blowup of \(\mathbb{CP}^2\) at a finite set of \(n\) points), or to \(\mathbb{CP}^1 \times \mathbb{CP}^1\). ``In this paper, we relate a property (which we call \textit{irreducibility}) of elements of the mapping class group \(\mathrm{Mod}(M) = \pi_0(\mathrm{Homeo}^+(M))\) for all del Pezzo manifolds \(M\) to the classification of conjugacy classes of order 2 elements of the group of birational automorphisms of \(\mathbb{CP}^2\). In doing so, we realize all order 2 mapping classes of del Pezzo manifolds by order 2 diffeomorphisms coming from a construction that we call \textit{complex equivariant connected sums}''. In particular, this gives an affirmative solution of the smooth Nielsen realization problem for involutions of del Pezzo manifolds, in contrast to the situation for some other 4-manifolds, for example for K3 surfaces where not all order 2 mapping classes can be smoothly realized by invoutions (or even by finite order diffeomorphism (Dehn twists about \((-2)\)-spheres), see a recent paper by \textit{B. Farb} and \textit{E. Looijenga} [``The Nielsen realization problem for K3 surfaces'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:2104.08187}, to appear in J. Differ. Geom.]. The author gives also a purely topological characterization of three types of involutions of certain \(M_n\) coming from birational geometry: ``de Jongquiéres, Geiser and Bertini involutions''.