Infinite homotopy stable class for 4-manifolds with boundary (Q6140364)

Throughout the paper, a manifold is understood to mean a compact, connected, oriented, topological manifold. ``Two \(4\)-manifolds \(M\) and \(N\) with the same Euler characteristic are stably homeomorphic, denoted \(M \cong_{\textrm{st}} N\), if there exists a nonnegative integer \(g\) and a homeomorphism \[ M \# W_g \cong N\# W_g \] where \(W_g\) is the \(g\)-fold connected sum of \(S^2 \times S^2\) with itself.'' For a fixed manifold \(M\), the authors first define the homotopy stable class as \[ \mathcal{S}_{h}^{\textrm{st}}:= \{N\mid N\cong_{\textrm{st}} M\} / \textrm{homotopy equivalence of pairs}. \] Here, a homotopy equivalence of pairs \(N_1 \simeq N_2\) is understood to be one that restricts to a homotopy equivalence between the boundaries. Using the equivariant intersection form \(\lambda_N\) of \(N\) as an invariant, \(\mathcal{S}_{h}^{\textrm{st}}\) can be arbitrarily large. For this reason, the authors study the homotopy stable class one intersection form at a time and set \[ \mathcal{S}_{h, \lambda}^{\textrm{st}}:= \{N\mid N\cong_{\textrm{st}} M, \lambda_N \cong \lambda_M\} / \textrm{homotopy equivalence of pairs}. \] ``Until now however, there have been no examples of 4-manifolds with infinite \(\mathcal{S}_{h, \lambda}^{\textrm{st}}\). For every odd prime \(q\), our main result (Theorem 1.1) describes a 4-manifold \(M\) with fundamental group \(\mathbb Z\) and infinite \(\mathcal{S}_{h, \lambda_{2q}}^{\textrm{st}}\)'' for a fixed Hermitian form \(\lambda_{2q}\).