Smooth structures on PL 4-manifolds

2009-12-05T20:16:47Z

Is it known whether $O(4) \to PL(4)$, the map from the orthogonal group to the group of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of $\mathbb{R}^4$, is a homotopy equivalence? By smoothing theory for PL manifolds, this is equivalent to whether the space of smooth structures on a PL 4-manifold is contractible. (I think it's known that this map is at least 4-connected, which shows that the space of smooth structures on any PL 4-manifold is nonempty and connected.)

Answer by Ryan Budney for Smooth structures on PL 4-manifolds

2009-12-05T20:26:03Z

Very little is known about that question, the same smoothing theory gives something that I'm trying to get people to call "The Cerf-Morlet Comparison Theorem"

$$ Diff(D^n) \simeq \Omega^{n+1}(PL(n)/O(n)) $$

$Diff(D^n)$ is the group of diffeomorphisms of the $n$-ball where the diffeomorphisms are pointwise fixed on the boundary. Nobody knows if $Diff(D^4)$ is path-connected or not. Very little is known about the homotopy-type of $Diff(D^4)$, no seriously informative statements other than that homotopy-equivalence. I wrote up a paper where I described in detail the iterated loop-space structure and how it arrises naturally. Moreover, I described how that iterated loop-space structure relates to various natural maps. That's my main relation to to topic. The paper is called "Little cubes and long knots" and is on the arXiv. I elaborate on some of these issues in the paper "A family of embedding spaces", also on the arXiv.

There are several natural connections here, one of the big ones being that $Diff(D^n)$ has the homotopy-type of the space of round metrics on $S^n$ -- ie the subspace of the affine-space of Riemann metrics on $S^n$, the subspace is specified by the condition that "$S^n$ with this metric is isometric to the standard $S^n$."

Smooth structures on PL 4-manifolds - MathOverflow

Smooth structures on PL 4-manifolds

Answer by Ryan Budney for Smooth structures on PL 4-manifolds