Kervaire-Milnor Group – Kervaire-Milnor Group of Homotopy Spheres and Smooth Poincare Conjecture

gt.geometric-topologyhomotopy-theorysmooth-manifolds

In [KM63], Kervaire and Milnor introduced the group of homotopy spheres. Its elements are h-cobordism classes of smooth homotopy $n$-spheres under the summation induced by connected sum. Further, the trivial element is $S^n$ and this group is denoted by $\Theta^n$.

They proved that $\Theta^n$ is finite unless $n=3$, in particular $\Theta^4$ is trivial.

This should be an ambiguous question but I wonder this provides a positive clue for the smooth Poincaré conjecture in dimension 4.

Best Answer

That a homotopy 4-sphere is h-cobordant to $S^4$ is in principle a step towards proving the 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture. But it's known from Donaldson's work that the h-cobordism theorem is false for simply connected closed $4$-manifolds. Indeed the step that fails is in cancelling handles that homologically cancel, and that issue would come up in trying to prove the Poincaré conjecture starting from an h-cobordism.

So unless there's something special about trivializing an h-cobordism between homotopy spheres that doesn't hold for slightly more complicated $4$-manifolds, I'd say that this fact isn't much of a clue.

Just an opinion, of course!

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