Simply connected minimal symplectic 4-manifolds with signature less than \(-1\) (Q845288)

Taubes and Li-Liu proved that minimal simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds satisfy \(2e + 3 \sigma \geq 0\), where \(e\) denotes the Euler characteristic and \(\sigma\) the signature. Moreover, every symplectic 4-manifold satisfies that \(e + \sigma \equiv 0\pmod 4\). For each pair \((e, \sigma)\) satisfying the above necessary conditions and signature \(\sigma\) less than \(-1\), the authors construct in this article, with four exceptions, a minimal simply connected symplectic 4-manifold with Euler characteristic \(e\) and signature \(\sigma\). They also construct minimal simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds with signature zero (resp. signature \(-1\)) and Euler characteristic \(4k\) (resp. \(4k+1\)) for all \(k \geq 46\) (resp. \(k \geq 49\)). The main methods are based on inductive constructions to produce simply connected manifolds starting with a few basic non-simply connected models.