Pochette surgery of 4-sphere (Q6165157)

The 4-dimensional smooth Poincaré conjecture claims that every homotopy 4-sphere is diffeomorphic to the standard 4-sphere. One strategy to attack this problem is to do surgery on appropriate 4-manifolds and to understand the surgery effects. The resulting manifolds which are homotopy equivalent to the 4-sphere (hence a topological 4-sphere) are candidates of potential exotic 4-spheres. Various surgery theories have been developed, e.g. Gluck surgery [\textit{R. E. Gompf} and \textit{A. I. Stipsicz}, 4-manifolds and Kirby calculus. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (1999; Zbl 0933.57020)]. \textit{Z. Iwase} and \textit{Y. Matsumoto} [``4-dimensional surgery on a ``pochette'''', in: Proceedings of the East Asian School of knots, links and related topics (2004)] introduced a generalization of Gluck surgery called pochette surgery. A pochette is the boundary connected sum of \(S^1 \times D^3\) and \(D^2\times S^2 \). A pochette surgery on the 4-manifold \(X\) is a cutting and pasting procedure removing the interior of a pochette \(P\) embedded in \(X\) and gluing \(P\) to \(X-\text{int }P\) by a self diffeomorphism of \(\partial P\). The diffeomorphism type of the surgery effect is determined by the embedding \(e : P\hookrightarrow X\) and the isotopy class of the gluing map. The aim of the current paper is to investigate pochette surgery with surgery effect a homotopy 4-sphere, and furthermore determine the diffeomorphism type. Various results are obtained. In particular, the authors prove that pochette surgery with the trivial cord does not change the diffeomorphism type or gives a Gluck surgery. They also show that there exist pochette surgeries on the 4-sphere with a nontrivial core sphere and a nontrivial cord such that the surgeries give the standard 4-sphere.