Fundamental groups of homology 4-spheres and complements of contractible submanifolds
Fix a prime , and for a group or space let denote the dimension of . A homology 4-sphere is a 4-manifold with the homology of the 4-sphere, and a contractible submanifold is a submanifold of the 4-sphere that is contractible. Homology-sphere complement conjecture. A group is the fundamental group of a homology 4-sphere if and only if it is the fundamental group of the complement of a contractible submanifold of the 4-sphere. This is an open problem because there is no characterization of the fundamental groups of homology 4-spheres, and it is also unknown whether such a characterization must depend on the smooth or topological category.
References
Primary source
Charles Livingston, “Four-manifolds of large negative deficiency”, arXiv:math/0302026 (2003).
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