Families of simply connected 4-manifolds with the same Seiberg–Witten invariants

This article presents several new constructions of infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds with the property that any two manifolds in the same family are homeomorphic. While the construction gives strong evidence that any two of these manifolds of are not diffeomorphic, they cannot be distinguished by Seiberg–Witten invariants. Whether these manifolds are, or are not, diffeomorphic seems to be a very difficult question to answer. For one of these constructions, each member of the family is symplectic with the further property that each contains nullhomologous tori with the property that infinitely many log transformations on these tori yield nonsymplectic 4-manifolds. This is detected by calculations of Seiberg–Witten invariants. The surgery in question can be performed on any 4-manifold which contains as a codimension 0 submanifold a punctured surface bundle over a punctured surface and a nontrivial loop in the base which has trivial monodromy. A starting point for another class of examples in this paper is a family of examples which show that the Parshin–Arakelov theorem for holomorphic Lefschetz fibrations is false in the symplectic category. Such families are constructed by means of knot surgery on ellipitic surfaces. It is shown that for a fixed homeomorphism type X (of a simply connected elliptic surface) and a fixed integer g⩾3, there are infinitely many genus g Lefschetz fibrations on nondiffeomorphic 4-manifolds, all homeomorphic to X.